Taylor Carman

The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty

Introduction Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen 1. Merleau-Ponty and the epistemological picture Charles Taylor 2. Sensation, judgment, and the phenomenal mind Taylor Carman 3. Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty Sean Dorrance Kelly 4. Motives, reasons and causes Mark A. Wrathall 5. Merleau-Ponty and recent cognitive science Hubert L. Dreyfus 6. The silent, limping body of philosophy Richard Shusterman 7. Merleau-Ponty and the touch of Malebranche Judith Butler 8. A phenomenology of life Renaud Barbaras 9. The embryology of the (in)visible Mark B. N. Hansen 10. Merleau-Pontys existential conception of science Joseph Rouse 11. Between philosophy and art Jonathan Gilmore 12. Understanding the engaged philosopher Lydia Goehr 13. Thinking politics Claude Lefort.

Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science

In opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation. He marshals convincing phenomenological evidence that higher primates and human beings learn to act skillfully without acquiring mental representations of the skill domain and of their goals. He also saw that no brain model available at the time he wrote could explain how this was possible. I argue that now, however, there are models of brain function that show how skills could be acquired and exercised without mind or brain representations. THE FAILURE OF REPRESENTATIONALIST MODELS OF THE MIND The cognitivist, Merleau-Ponty’s intellectualist opponent, holds that, as the learner improves through practice, he abstracts and interiorizesmore andmore sophisticated rules. There is no phenomenological or empirical evidence that convincingly supports this view, however, and, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the flexibility, transferability, and situational sensitivity of skills makes the intellectualist account implausible.

The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy

In the field of Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is something like the patron saint of the body. Although La Mettrie, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Foucault have also passionately championed the bodily dimension of human life, none can match the bulk of rigorous, systematic, and persistent argument that Merleau-Ponty provides to prove the bodys primacy in human experience and meaning. With tireless eloquence that almost seems to conquer by its massive unrelenting flow, he insists that the body is not only the crucial source of all perception and action, but also the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning. Paradoxically, while celebrating the bodys role in expression, Merleau-Ponty typically characterizes it in terms of silence. The body, he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, constitutes “the tacit cogito, ” “the silent cogito, ” the “unspoken cogito .” As our “primary subjectivity,” it is “the consciousness which conditions language,” but itself remains a “silent consciousness” with an “inarticulate grasp of the world” ( PP 461-3/402-4/468-70). Forming “the background of silence” ( S 58/46) that is necessary for language to emerge, the body, as gesture, is also already “a tacit language” ( S 59/47) and the ground of all expression: “every human use of the body is already primordial expression ” ( S 84/67).

Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field

Merleau-Pontys interconnected critiques of empiricism and intellectualism run like a double helix through the pages of Phenomenology of Perception . In the decades since its publication in 1945, philosophical and psychological theories of perception have continued to take for granted empiricist and intellectualist models and metaphors, although their respective claims to preeminence have tended to swing to and fro in unpredictable ways. As a result, although the current state of play in the philosophy of mind for us today differs widely from what it was for Merleau-Ponty in the middle of the last century, neither would he find it altogether unrecognizable. His objection to the empiricist concept of sensation (or “sense data” or “qualia”), for example, is likely to strike contemporary readers as familiar and plausible, thanks in part to arguments advanced in a roughly kindred spirit by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfrid Sellars, and Thomas Kuhn. To launch an attack on intellectualism as Merleau-Ponty does, by contrast, might look more like tilting at windmills, or beating a dead rationalist horse, or perhaps just failing, understandably enough, to anticipate the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology that took place after his death in 1961.

First Persons: On Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement

Richard Morans Authority and Estrangement offers a subtle and innovative account of self-knowledge that lifts the problem out of the narrow confines of epistemology and into the broader context of practical reasoning and moral psychology. Moran argues convincingly that fundamental self/other asymmetries are essential to our concept of persons. Moreover, the first- and the third-person points of view are systematically interconnected, so that the expression or avowal of ones attitudes constitutes a substantive form of self-knowledge. But while Morans argument is wide-ranging and compelling, he relies throughout on an overly intellectualized conception of first-person attitudes as attitudes of reflection or deliberation. That conception is at once implausible and unnecessary to the main current of his argument, whose goal is to demonstrate that our self-conception as persons depends on both the distinctness and the interconnectedness of our first- and third-person perspectives on ourselves.

Heidegger's concept of presence

The central question in Heideggers philosophy, early and late, is that concerning the meaning of being. Recently, some have suggested that Heidegger himself interprets being to mean presence (Anwesen, Anwesenheit, Praesenz), citing as evidence lectures dating from the 1920s to the 1960s. I argue, on the contrary, that Heidegger regards the equation between being and presence as the hallmark of metaphysical thinking, and that it only ever appears in his texts as a gloss on the philosophical tradition, not as an expression of his own ontological commitments. In his early work Heidegger seeks to confront and even correct the traditional interpretation of being by challenging its narrow preoccupation with presence and the present. By the 1930s, however, he abandons the idea that there is anything to‐be intrinsically right or wrong about with regard to the meaning of being and turns his attention instead to what he calls ‘appropriation’ (Ereignis) or the truth of being, that is, the essentially ahistorical co...