Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

As with other figures of like stature, there is a vast amount of secondary literature devoted to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The last decade or so in particular has seen the publication of numerous new books. Why one more?

A critical glance at the situation in recent English-language Merleau-Ponty scholarship may be instructive here. For we see that the vast majority of recent volumes fall into one of the following two categories: (1) general introductions and reference works,¹ including several edited collections of a general nature,² and (2) applications of Merleau-Ponty’s work to specific topics or problems.³ Many of these contributions are, in whole or in part, of significant scholarly value. But nonetheless, a clear pattern emerges: in recent years little new basic interpretive research on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work itself has been accorded book-length treatment, and what has been published has invariably tended either to adopt an overall view of his corpus that emphasizes his later works, or else to focus exclusively on the latter.⁴ In other words, even though recent years have seen a marked upsurge in the level of interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work, both within and beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, and even though Phenomenology of Perception remains, by all accounts, his magnum opus,⁵ there has been no new book-length scholarly contribution aimed principally at coming to terms with the formulation of existential phenomenology that this text epitomizes. There is, rather, an overwhelming tacit consensus that this early stage of Merleau-Ponty’s work has, over the last 60-plus years, already been sufficiently studied, such that there is really nothing new (of any philosophical consequence) to be said about it.⁶ It might be expounded or elucidated or spun or summarized or applied in this or that new way, but the standard working assumption is that with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology in the immediate postwar period, there remain, so to speak, no unturned stones.

Methodological questions

There can be no denying that Merleau-Ponty’s later works are of immense philosophical interest, and this is especially true of the recently published and as-yet still unpublished materials from his lectures at the Collège de France. Be that as it may, however, it is fundamentally mistaken to maintain that critical scrutiny of Merleau-Ponty’s early reinterpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology as expressed primarily in Phenomenology of Perception is, for all intents and purposes, an exhausted project. There may be several reasons for this, but one aspect stands out quite prominently—to wit, the question of method. It would be very difficult for any Merleau-Ponty scholar to disagree with the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s work from the early postwar period, and Phenomenology of Perception in particular, is (or at least appears to be) rather elusive with regard to conveying the underlying methodology on the basis of which its claims unfold. Such methodological elusiveness or unforthcomingness may also be found in some of Merleau-Ponty’s later works too, and no doubt something similar is true of many (or even most) other philosophers as well. But reticence of this kind is particularly problematic in the context of phenomenology, and of transcendental phenomenology especially. For here, methodological issues concerning the nature of the phenomenological reduction—in general terms (including the epoché) and in its various possible modes (e.g. eidetic reduction)—are of paramount importance. As a distinctive approach to philosophical problems, transcendental phenomenology stands or falls with its conception of the reduction for at least two related reasons. First, the reduction is indispensable for any genuine phenomenology to get off the ground. As Eugen Fink once put it, “There is no phenomenology that does not pass through the ‘reduction.’ Anything calling itself ‘phenomenology’ while renouncing the reduction would in principle be a mundane philosophy, which is to say, a ‘dogmatic’ one (in the phenomenological sense)” (KS 105n1/146n11, translation modified).⁷ Second, whatever philosophical insights to which phenomenology may lay claim are unavoidably conditioned by the manner in which the reduction is performed, since those insights can only be based on the evidence of the phenomena that are thereby disclosed. It is thus simply not possible to overstate the extent to which the philosophical coherence and viability of transcendental phenomenology depend essentially upon its methodological self-understanding. And yet this self-understanding is not easily achieved. As Merleau-Ponty himself noted, even Husserl struggled at length with the “problematic of the reduction”—“there is probably no other question on which Husserl spent more time trying to understand—nor one to which he returned more often” (PhP v).⁸ Consideration of these points—namely, the vital indispensability of the reduction, and the importance of getting clear about it—cannot but render the apparent elusiveness of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with regard to methodology all the more puzzling and frustrating.⁹

Take, for instance, the well-known and oft-cited remark made in the Preface to the effect that “the best formulation” of the reduction was given by Fink “when he spoke of a ‘wonder’ [« étonnement »] before the world” (PhP viii; cf. 341f).¹⁰ This was a point that Fink made in all of his important summary expositions of Husserl’s project that he produced in the 1930s, articles which had a crucial formative impact on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology: “the origin of philosophical problems is wonder” [Verwunderung] (Fink 1966d, 182; cf. Fink 1966c, 168.).¹¹ Such is, of course, a venerable sentiment, one that may be traced back at least to the Socratic claim that “wonder [thaumazein] is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”¹² And Fink’s connecting this to phenomenology is by no means an eccentric claim peculiar to him. Beginning with Husserl himself, phenomenologists have often conceived their work as rooted in something like that ancient sense of wonder.¹³

Yet, surely the best formulation of the phenomenological reduction cannot simply amount to a reiteration of a traditional notion, and one to which, needless to say, phenomenology has no proprietary claim. Fink himself was more specific. For him, philosophical wonder concerned the being of the world itself, and he claimed that the philosophical uniqueness of phenomenology lies in its effort radically to inculcate and operationalize this wonder methodologically. Phenomenological inquiry begins with the phenomenological reduction which, through the suspension of the natural attitude, brings about “the awakening of an immeasurable wonder over the mysteriousness” of the state of affairs [Sachlage] confronting philosophy at its beginning [das Erwachen einer maßlosen Verwunderung über die Rätselhaftigkeit dieser Sachlage] (KS 115f/109).¹⁴ This wonder involves the loss of naïve obviousness, the disconcerting astonishment of which “displaces man from the captivation [Befangenheit] in everyday, publicly pre-given, traditional and worn-out familiarity with existents.” It “drives one from an always already authorized and expressly laid-out interpretation of the sense of the world,” with the result that the phenomenologist “once again opens himself primordially [uranfänglich] to the world, finding himself in the dawn of a new day of the world [in der Morgendämmerung eines neuen Welttages] in which he, and everything that is, begins to appear in a new light” (Fink 1966d, 183).

As we shall see, Fink had much more to say about the reduction. But Merleau-Ponty may have been echoing these general ideas in glossing as follows his own view of the reduction in terms of wonder: “reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the foundation of the world; rather, it steps back in order to see transcendences surge forth [jaillir] and it slackens [distend] the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear” (PhP viii). It is in this way that, for Merleau-Ponty, “true philosophy is a matter of learning to see the world anew [rapprendre à voir le monde]” (PhP xvi).

Merleau-Ponty thus concurred with Fink’s main criticism of Kantian philosophy, namely, that it is not genuinely transcendental but rather remains “worldly” [« mondaine »], in that it ultimately takes the world for granted and makes use of it, rather than, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “wondering about the world and conceiving the subject as a transcendence toward it” (PhP viii). But he also self-consciously deviated from Fink—and, indeed, from everyone, including Husserl himself—inasmuch as he took this interpretation of phenomenology decisively in a particular existential direction that emphasizes what he called the “paradoxical” nature of the world.¹⁵ By this, Merleau-Ponty meant that the being of the world does not simply present a “mysterious” state of affairs, the resolution of which could be achieved through the insights of transcendental phenomenology. Rather, his point was that the world is a mystery, that it is “defined” by its mysteriousness, and that therefore “there can be no question of dispelling it [the mystery] through any sort of ‘solution’ ” [il ne saurait être question de le dissiper par quelque « solution »]—it is “below the level” of any solution [il est en déça des solutions] (PhP xvi). Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, not only is it necessary to “break” [rompre] our familiarity with the world, but moreover—and this is what’s crucial—what this rupture can teach us is “nothing but the unmotivated upsurge [le jaillissement immotivé] of the world” (PhP viii). This is crucial because from it follows immediately the most famous and celebrated claim regarding the phenomenological reduction in Phenomenology of Perception, namely, the claim that “the most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (PhP viii).

The point of this well-known assertion is to emphasize the spatial and temporal inherence of phenomenology in the world, such that the “radical reflection” it undertakes by way of the reduction is inescapably dependent upon pregiven layers of “unreflective life.” Most readers of Merleau-Ponty who incline favorably toward his project view this claim as a concise expression of the way in which he takes up Husserlian phenomenology without succumbing—as Husserl himself supposedly did—to idealism or “intellectualism” and all its concomitant philosophical deficiencies. In other words, it is taken as an expression of how Merleau-Ponty goes Husserl one better methodologically.

Leaving aside the question as to whether or not this is fair with regard to Husserl, there is, on the face of it, something suspect about Merleau-Ponty’s assertion. For even if it is granted that the reduction as envisioned by Husserl is indeed something that cannot in all strictness be completely carried out, it still doesn’t quite make sense to say that the reduction itself could supply us with this lesson. The underlying point is a general one: how could any methodological procedure all by itself indicate its own limitations in an epistemically reliable way? To be sure, one may take up the phenomenological reduction in an attempt to do what Husserl had supposedly hoped to do and then find that it always comes up short. But in that case, the conclusion that would be warranted is not that the reduction is all well and good up to that point but no further, that is, in an incomplete form, but rather that the reduction is inherently flawed and should simply be discarded altogether. Just as archers, for example, may not legitimately claim technical mastery when they move their targets to wherever their arrows happen to land, no philosophical method that fails to achieve its own ostensible goals can be simply retained—that is, retained with further ado—as a successful way of reaching whatever unexpected results at which it chanced to arrive. Absent a sound and lucid methodological self-understanding as to how they were reached, and why any further targets are illusory, those results are, technically speaking, meaningless noise—or, in phenomenological parlance, they are transcendentally naïve. In short, if the phenomenological reduction grinds to a halt before attaining the goal it was designed to achieve, then the immediate implication is one of failure, with the result that no putative insights at all, whether with reference to the intentional objects under consideration up to that point or to the reduction itself qua method, could be considered reliable.

The point here is that while it is no doubt true that a complete reduction in the sense intended by Merleau-Ponty is indeed impossible, it makes no sense to say that one could learn this as a truth from an incomplete performance of that same reduction—a truncated implementation of a misguided procedure is not a recipe for insight. Pending further methodological elaboration, then, it remains entirely unclear as to why and how the reduction would be retained at all.

As mentioned above, the idea of an incomplete reduction is widely held and even celebrated as a positive virtue of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology—an existentially modified version of an originally idealist procedure that nonetheless remains methodologically central. But what exactly this means and amounts to has not been fully examined. In particular, the consequences that would follow in terms of the status of Phenomenology of Perception as a work of philosophy, if it is allowed that its central methodological procedure is necessarily incomplete, have been left unscrutinized. For while it may be clear enough how a complete reduction would (per impossibile) yield definitive philosophical truth, it would seem that on its own, an existentially limited performance of the same procedure could never attain any comparable degree of philosophical conclusiveness (including, of course, with regard to metaphysical claims concerning “ambiguity,” since these would be pointless if they themselves were ambiguous). For it could never achieve the sort of determinate epistemic closure that is necessary to make compelling truth claims. That is, unless it borrows covertly the principles of verification or claims of apodicticity, for example, from the idealism it vigorously rejects, an existentially modified version of the reduction can never find itself in a position to make bona fide philosophical claims.

This is not to say that such is in fact the case with Phenomenology of Perception. Rather, it is to suggest that the incomplete reduction is not the whole methodological story here. Surely no one is prepared to draw the scandalous conclusion that “one of the great texts of twentieth-century philosophy” (Carman 2012, vii)¹⁶ is actually—and even by its author’s own admission!—methodologically incomplete, that is, lacking in rigorous methodological completeness of any kind. To be sure, such is a possible outcome. Before it is conceded, though, it strongly behooves anyone who holds that Phenomenology of Perception is indeed a text that makes vitally important philosophical claims to first make some concerted effort to disclose and to come to terms positively—rather than by privative reference to an impossibility¹⁷—with how it is that this work might indeed be considered methodologically complete. There is no room for ambiguity here—Phenomenology of Perception either is or is not methodologically complete, and only one option would allow us to take its results seriously.

Philosophical scholarship on Phenomenology of Perception has yet to settle this question. More specifically, those who appreciate the work as a major contribution to philosophy—as opposed to a very sophisticated contribution to psychology, say, or even to literature—have yet to render explicit the methodological completeness that they effectively assume is there, even if, as is not uncommon, they are unaware of making this assumption, or take no cognizance of the problem at all. It is first and foremost on this basis, then, that the idea, according to which there is fundamentally nothing new to say about Phenomenology of Perception, should be flatly rejected. This rejection opens up a space for genuinely fresh exegetical and interpretive work on this text related to issues of method, and it is in this space that the present book should be located.

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This book thus aims at something like a rereading of Phenomenology of Perception. But if by rereading is understood an undertaking of comprehensive critical exegesis cover-to-cover, then a rereading as such goes well beyond its scope. Rather, the much more modest aim of this book is merely to do some of the groundwork for a critical rereading of Phenomenology of Perception by coming to terms with the problem of its methodological completeness. Its aim, in other words, is to articulate a previously uncharted angle of critical analysis which, by being based on the immanent methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s work, would be able to support insightful new approaches to the exegesis, interpretation, and ultimately the evaluation and, if possible, the further development and application of Merleau-Ponty’s text.

In a certain way, though, this book does in fact deal with Phenomenology of Perception cover to cover. For there are two moments in the text that are of crucial importance to the overall discussion here, and they happen to fall—although this is anything but coincidental—on the very first and the very last pages. The first of these two moments is the reference to Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation that occurs in the first paragraph of the Preface (PhP i) and the second is comprised of the lines drawn from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre with which Merleau-Ponty’s book, as is well known, ends (PhP 520). Neither of these moments has been the object of critical scrutiny in the scholarship devoted to Merleau-Ponty,¹⁸ although their importance in terms of understanding Phenomenology of Perception is without parallel. The initial reference to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, a work devoted to “the idea of a transcendental theory of method,” properly interpreted along with other explicit and implicit allusions made in the text, serves to indicate the basic methodological problem with which Merleau-Ponty had to grapple in composing Phenomenology of Perception, resolution of which was the conditio sine qua non for the wholehearted embrace of and identification with the phenomenological project, duly reconceived, that this book represents. The second key moment, the passage drawn from Saint Exupéry, manifests quite spectacularly Merleau-Ponty’s resolution of this problem, and as such, it possesses superlative significance with regard to understanding the specific inner nature of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology.

The present book focuses primarily on coming to terms with the second of these moments, that is, the Exupérian climax of Phenomenology of Perception. Although the cited passage is invariably given a warmly affirmative but inconsequential gloss whenever it is referred to in the scholarly literature on Merleau-Ponty, there is, as we shall see, actually much more going on than is readily apparent, and there are some unexpected interpretive difficulties that demand resolution.¹⁹ Critical scrutiny will bring to light that, at least prima facie, it is deeply puzzling that Phenomenology of Perception concludes as it does. The main thrust of this book is devoted to dealing with this problem and its attendant difficulties by construing the end of Phenomenology of Perception in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s solution to certain methodological issues concerning the reduction that had been posed by Fink—and more specifically, in terms of the solution that Merleau-Ponty had conceived as an alternative to that offered by Fink himself. In order to contextualize this in a way that will allow for a full appreciation of the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s position and what is at stake in it, then, it is necessary to first discuss the relevant aspects of Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation.²⁰

Eugen Fink and the idea of constructive phenomenology

In his capacity as Husserl’s assistant, Fink drafted the Sixth Cartesian Meditation in 1932 as part of the project of systematically reworking the (five) Cartesian Meditations which, subsequent to their publication in French translation, Husserl had come to regard as still beholden to a certain transcendental naïveté.²¹ For most of the time since then, this work led a sort of underground existence. In addition to Husserl, a small circle of others close to him were able to consult it shortly after its composition, including Gaston Berger, to whom Fink actually lent his (one) carbon copy of the text in 1934—a copy which apparently was never returned.²² When he left Leuven in 1940, Fink retrieved the original typescripts from the newly established Husserl archive in Leuven (Bruzina 1995, xxxiii). Following the war, Fink submitted the work—as he had intended to do, with Husserl’s support, in 1933, only to be thwarted for “political reasons” having to do with his connection to Husserl (Bruzina 1995, xx; cf. lxxv n63)—as his Habilitationsschrift at Freiburg (Bruzina 1995, xxxiv). As he noted at the time, Fink chose to submit the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, as opposed to newer and more substantial work, largely because it did carry that original endorsement from Husserl. The choice was thus more ceremonial than philosophical. Fink saw its submission as “an act of piety [Pietät],” a statement of critical allegiance to Husserl and to his project.²³ And as he noted in a letter to Hermann Van Breda, his Habilitation was in fact seen by the University as a case of “political reparation.”²⁴ Unlike most, however, this Schrift faded from view. In part, this is because the work was somewhat extraneous to Fink’s own emerging intellectual trajectory. But it is also the case that it had far-reaching critical implications for transcendental phenomenology that were easily liable to misunderstanding, for which reason Fink had never intended it to be widely available.²⁵ And this reluctance to disseminate the work did not change after the war. The text thus remained unpublished in Fink’s lifetime—it did not appear until 1988, 13 years after his death.

These facts are significant for two reasons. First, it was only on account of Berger’s extended possession of the carbon copy that Merleau-Ponty was able to read the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, which he did in 1942.²⁶ It has always been known that Merleau-Ponty had read this monograph, as he explicitly cited it three times in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, including—as mentioned above—on the very first page. Second, however, owing to its subsequent history, Fink’s text was entirely inaccessible to anyone interested in Merleau-Ponty’s book for over 40 years. It was thus never discussed, let alone established as an important point of reference, in scholarly commentary on Phenomenology of Perception. The references to Fink’s text were simply passed over in silence.

Yet, despite the lack of attention that it has received in the literature, the impact that the Sixth Cartesian Meditation had on Merleau-Ponty’s thought at the time of writing Phenomenology of Perception was singularly important.²⁷ This impact, however, had to do with the formal terms in which Fink posed the basic methodological problem faced by phenomenology, rather than with the actual solution that he proposed—for Merleau-Ponty disagreed quite sharply with that and offered a radically different solution. Fink’s text was thus a decisively important methodological foil against which Merleau-Ponty worked out the basic terms of his own reinterpretation of phenomenological methodology.²⁸ In order to fully understand Phenomenology of Perception (and by implication any of Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent work inasmuch as it represents either an extension or critique of Phenomenology of Perception), then, it is imperative to understand the salient aspects of “the idea of a transcendental theory of method” that Fink had developed in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation.²⁹

To begin, consider Merleau-Ponty’s initial reference to Fink. As is well known, Merleau-Ponty opened the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception by asking: “What is phenomenology?,” and he motivated this question, insisting on its still being open, by noting several pairs of seemingly incompatible tendencies within phenomenology which would have led those of Merleau-Ponty’s readers who were aware of them to doubt seriously the philosophical coherence of the project. Merleau-Ponty thus juxtaposed a search for essences with a concern for facticity, a standpoint of transcendental reflection with perspectives based in the pregivenness of the world, and the goal of rigorous scientificity with the relativeness of something like Lebensphilosophie. These points of contrast—or, as he put it, “contradictions”—roughly track idealist versus existentialist understandings of phenomenology, and they effectively boil down to the apparent opposition between a transcendental eidetic science and a concrete account of lived experience. It is within the final “contradiction” that the reference to Fink appears, and at issue here is methodology: Merleau-Ponty juxtaposed phenomenology construed as a project of “direct description” with two further developments: first, Husserl’s reference to “genetic phenomenology” in his Cartesian Meditations (which, as it had been published in a French translation, was something that many of Merleau-Ponty’s readers would have been familiar with) and second, the idea of “constructive phenomenology” that Fink discussed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (of which literally only a handful at most of Merleau-Ponty’s readers in France could possibly have had any idea at all).

Merleau-Ponty’s point here was that each of these developments is at odds with phenomenology understood as presuppositionless description of intuitional givenness in strict accordance with Husserl’s original “principle of all principles.”³⁰ For he implied that “genetic phenomenology” would take into account aspects of the “psychological genesis” of experience, in order to situate critically its intuitionally given content, and that “constructive phenomenology” would go further by introducing into consideration “the causal explanations [of experience] that the scientist [le savant], historian, or sociologist could provide,” which is to say, broader third-personal or “external spectator” perspectives on human existence that would serve in turn to situate critically even “genetic” accounts of lived experience. In each case, it is a matter of reorienting phenomenological attention to the background of a given level of experience.

Merleau-Ponty did not elaborate in any detail in this opening paragraph. But he made it clear that he saw a profound tension between the idea of direct description and the sort of critical philosophical comprehension that phenomenology ideally aspires to achieve. For the latter demands a dimension of transcendental critique that straightforward description alone is incapable of providing. And if we admit “the unmotivated upsurge of the world,” then how could it be otherwise? Direct description could not but reflect that opaque facticity naïvely. Merleau-Ponty wanted to insist, however, that this tension is not a shortcoming, but on the contrary, that phenomenology lives in and through it—and, in particular, that its “contradictoriness” is not extraneous to but rather fully present within Husserl’s own work.³¹ Merleau-Ponty’s initial reference to Fink is thus ambivalent. On the one hand, the suggestion is that Fink’s idea of constructive phenomenology implies a salutary openness to supplement first-person description with insights drawn from an external standpoint. On the other hand, however, the tone of the reference indicates unmistakably that Merleau-Ponty regarded Fink’s idea with some suspicion, as being another one-sided expression of a particular metaphysical tendency internal to phenomenology. What is thereby suggested is that while there is something partly correct about the idea of constructive phenomenology, along with all the other “contradictory” aspects of the project, it too needs to be reconciled under the auspices of a genuinely phenomenological understanding of what phenomenology is.

Such is Merleau-Ponty’s task, both in the Preface itself and beyond. In order to appreciate fully his efforts, it is necessary to lay out in some detail the account of constructive phenomenology that Fink developed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. To this end, I will unpack Fink’s dense and technical text in terms of the problem of phenomenological self-reference, and the fundamental parameters of his own proposed solution. This will unfold as follows: I will provide (1) an account of Fink’s construal of the phenomenologist as a detached theoretical “onlooker” [Zuschauer] that does not participate in the constitution of the world, and show (2) how this gives rise to a specific problem of transcendental “illusion” [Schein] which requires for its resolution (3) a speculative interpretation of phenomenology as the “absolute science” of the constitution of worldly Being [Sein] in terms of processes obtaining in the extraworldly dimension of “pre-Being” [Vor-Sein].³² I shall then consider Merleau-Ponty’s response to this, as well as some of the issues that it raises and how these serve to motivate taking a fresh look at Phenomenology of Perception.

The phenomenological onlooker

Fink’s proposed revisions to the original Cartesian Meditations cut strongly against their “Cartesian” character, in particular by insisting upon the pre-givenness of the world as phenomenology’s initial situation, and emphasizing that, just as much as it encompasses transcendent being, the world includes the sphere of human immanence. To deflect the common but mistaken view that performing the phenomenological reduction entails withdrawing into an inner domain of apodictic self-certainty, Fink locks human existence within the mundane world by circumscribing it ontologically, that is, by interpreting the “natural attitude” as a necessary transcendental fact of human existence. Rather than as any kind of psychological complex within the world, it is a matter of the constant world-apperception that is essentially constitutive of human experience. For Fink, world-belief is “the primal happening [Urgeschehen] of our transcendental existence” (Fink 1988b, 187), such that “existing-within-the-belief-in-the-world and believing oneself to be human are inextricably one and the same” [Im-Weltglauben-sein und im Selbstglauben als Mensch sein sind untrennbar eins] (KS, 115/109, translation modified). Hence, rather than as the “natural attitude,” Fink preferred to denote the mundane predicament of human existence as Weltbefangenheit, captivation in/by the world (see Bruzina 1998, 57–60; Cairns 1976, 95). Human beings as such are imprisoned by ontic preoccupations.

Although familiar with the disagreements between Husserl and Heidegger over the being of transcendental and mundane subjectivity, in thus posing the “question of being,” Fink was not following Heidegger (cf. Bernet 1989). For he rejects the “ontological priority” of Dasein. Instead, his move is to rethink Husserl’s project on the basis of a sharper ontological difference between mundane and transcendental subjectivity, construing the former as the latter’s worldly self-apperception, that is, as the constituted product of extramundane constitution. For Fink, “the existent is only the result of a constitution,” and “constitution is always constitution of the existent” (SCM 23/21; cf. 108/99). Key here is that the constitutive coming-to-be of an existent is not itself an existent (SCM 82/73), and thus cannot be understood in terms of worldly ontology. Fink argued that, pending a special reduction of it, our idea of being pertains exclusively to constituted objectivity of the natural attitude—hence the transcendental naïveté of the original Meditations (cf. SCM 78–84/70–5). As constitutive origination and becoming of the world, what we would call transcendental being “is” “simply and solely in the process” (SCM 49/45; cf. 107/97). Fink denotes this constitutive process as “enworlding” [Verweltlichung], or more precisely, as “primary” or “proper [eigentliche] enworlding” (SCM 108/99; cf. 23/21). And he refers to its “being-mode,” which transcends the mundane idea of being, as “pre-being” [“Vor-Sein”]. Initially, at any rate, this is the central object of phenomenological investigation.

Radicalizing phenomenology’s basic problematic in this way, however, it follows for Fink that, as weltbefangen entities, human beings are constitutively incapable of effecting the epoché, performing the reduction, and of carrying out the phenomenological investigation of primary enworlding. This could only occur outside the world; hence, the proper agency of phenomenological reflection must have transcendental status. Yet, at the same time, this agency must be separate from, that is, not participate in, the process that it is supposed to investigate. Consequently, in tandem with the ontological difference between mundane and transcendental, Fink further posits a radical “splitting” [Spaltung] within transcendental being—hence what Fink called the triadic “performance-structure” [Vollzugsstruktur] of the phenomenological reduction (KS 122/115). This splitting is the epoché, a “structural moment of transcendental reflection” (KS 121/115) whereby transcendental life “steps outside itself,” producing the “non-participant” [unbeteiligte] “phenomenological onlooker” (SCM 26/23; Fink 1988b, 187; cf. Husserl, Crisis 285). The result is an antithetical duality at the transcendental level whereby the onlooker breaks with the “innermost vital tendency” of transcendental life (SCM 12/12), namely, the constitutive realization of the world, setting up a countertendency to it (SCM 26/24). As this countertendency, the onlooker’s phenomenologizing is the becoming-for-itself of transcendentally constituting life. Fink describes the resulting dynamic in dialectical terms: “Split in this way, transcendental life turns upon itself, becomes objective [gegenständlich] to itself, and comes to itself through theoretical self-illumination” (Fink 1988b, 187; cf. SCM 163/147).³³

Fink does not deny that the reduction is played out at the mundane level. But he insists that as “a theoretical self-surmounting [Selbstüberwindung] of man” (KS 134/126), the action it implies cannot be understood in worldly terms. For the reduction “de-objectifies, de-worlds intentional life by removing the self-apperceptions that enworld it, that situate it in the world,” rendering wholly immanent the “depths of the intentional life of belief where the psychical life’s self-apperception is first validly constructed” (KS 142/133). While a human subject may undergo such an experience, she is not the active reducing subject per se. Rather, the active element can only be the onlooker, the transcendental subject’s tendency toward self-consciousness as it may happen to “awaken” in her. It is not any kind of human self-reflection, but rather transcendental subjectivity, “concealed in self-objectivation as man, reflectively think[ing] about itself” (SCM 36/32). In fact, on account of how he poses the basic problem of phenomenology, Fink is committed not only to denying that the reduction cannot be independently motivated in the natural attitude,³⁴ but moreover that “phenomenologizing is not a human possibility at all, but signifies precisely the un-humanizing [Entmenschung] of man, the passing of human existence . . . into the transcendental subject” (SCM 132/120; cf. 36, 43–4/32, 40; KS 110/104).

That the agent of phenomenology must be the non-participating transcendental onlooker is the guiding idea in Fink’s attempt to redress the transcendental naïveté of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. But what is also required is a “self-objectification” [Selbstvergegenständlichung] of the onlooker (SCM 14/13), a self-referential thematization of its phenomenologizing (SCM 25/23), lacking which a new naïveté would simply replace the old. For even if, through the onlooker’s phenomenologizing, primary enworlding gains self-consciousness, the being of the onlooker itself remains a mystery. As Fink put it: “In the field of ‘transcendentality’ there remains . . . something still uncomprehended, precisely the phenomenological theorizing ‘onlooker’” (SCM 13/12; cf. 24–5/22–3). This is the focus of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as a work of methodology. Taking up Husserl’s own directive that transcendental phenomenology subject itself to rigorous methodological self-critique (Husserl 1969, 289; 1960, 29, 151f; see also Luft 2002, 8–22), Fink’s aim is to clarify how the transcendental experience of the phenomenological onlooker could gain a complete self-conscious comprehension of its own activity and thereby establish itself scientifically. Phenomenological methodology is “the phenomenological science of phenomenologizing, the phenomenology of phenomenology” (SCM 13/12), in the sense of “submit[ting] the phenomenologizing thought and theory-formation that functions anonymously in phenomenological labors to a proper transcendental analytic, and thus to complete phenomenology in ultimate transcendental self-understanding about itself” (SCM 8–9/9).

The problem of transcendental illusion

The view of transcendental phenomenology presented in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation conspicuously reflects the structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in a number of ways. For example, Fink distinguished the transcendental theory of method, as the dimension of phenomenology that thematizes itself, from what he called the “transcendental theory of elements,” the dimension of phenomenology that thematizes transcendental subjectivity as primary enworlding. While initially the latter may be the central object of phenomenological investigation, it would be wrong to regard that as phenomenology proper, to which the theory of method would be a sort of appendix (as many readers of Kant’s first Critique mistakenly regard his theory of method).³⁵ Rather, Fink’s account of the phenomenological investigation of primary enworlding shows that its scientificity depends crucially on what the theory of method offers—in particular, on what he called, again echoing Kant, the “canon of phenomenological reason.”³⁶ For while the ontological status of the onlooker makes transcendental cognition possible, it also presents phenomenology with certain paradoxes, such that its quest for transcendental truth is congenitally susceptible (here we hear Kant again) to “transcendental illusion.” For Kant, this has to do with certain rationally necessary transcendental fictions which, if applied theoretically beyond the scope of experience, give rise to the dialectical fallacies of dogmatic metaphysics, but which are not necessarily deceptive (KrV A645/B673), as they possess indispensable heuristic value when employed regulatively (see Grier 2001, 268–88). In contrast, for Fink, transcendental illusion is not something that bears directly upon transcendental insight at all, but is a problem having to do with how transcendental truth appears, that is, with the fact that it can only appear in mundane form as “appearance-truth” [Erscheinungswahrheit] or “seeming truth” [Scheinwahrheit].³⁷ Whereas for Kant, then, there can be no canon of pure theoretical reason—there is a negative discipline for that, while he strictly limits the positive canon to reason’s practical use (KrV A797/B825), as conceived by Fink, the canon of phenomenological reason is precisely that which enables us to distinguish between “mere appearance-truths” and “proper transcendental truths” with respect to phenomenologizing (SCM 111, 120f, 129f, 134/101, 110, 118, 121).

We can distinguish two levels within phenomenology’s problem of transcendental illusion. First, there is the matter of communicating transcendental truth—how it appears to others. (Fink’s Kant-Studien article is mainly limited to this level of the problem.) The issue here is that phenomenology faces profound, paradoxical difficulties when it tries to express its transcendental insights within the weltbefangen conceptual confines of ordinary language and formal logic (KS 153/142; cf. 155, 80/145, 75). However, strictly speaking, that is not a problem within phenomenology. Rather, it is a matter of others’ limited understanding—a symptom of the growing pains of phenomenology at an early stage of its development.³⁸

But the problem of transcendental illusion is not limited to the difficulties attaching to the communication of phenomenological truth. There is a deeper level to the problem, (upon which Fink deliberately held back from elaborating in his Kant-Studien article)—namely, how transcendental truth appears at all (KS 153/142). For in Fink’s account, phenomenology is separate from enworlding. How then does it appear? How is it that phenomenology “un-performs” the reduction, as it were—how does it effect an un-un-humanizing—so as to avoid being stranded in transcendence?

The second level of the problem of transcendental illusion takes us inside phenomenology. There are two aspects to consider. First, there is the nature of transcendental cognition itself. In a sense, illusion obtains here germinally. For the onlooker’s experience of enworlding necessarily involves a “transcendental ontification.” That is, it necessarily reproduces the framework of mundane ontology at the “pre-existent” level (SCM 83/74). “[T]he theoretical experience of the phenomenological onlooker ontifies the ‘pre-existent’ life-processes of transcendental subjectivity and is therefore in a sense—a sense not comparable to any mode of productivity pregiven in a worldly way—‘productive’ ” (SCM 85f/76). But because this “productivity” transpires at the level of apperception presupposed by any mundane experience, there is no “appearing,” and therefore no deception—this is just the form that transcendental insight must take. And this will become progressively more suitable as the reduction of the idea of being that is required to properly understand primary enworlding gets worked out philosophically. It is just that this process starts in the natural attitude.

The natural attitude, however, “is not only the wherefrom [Wo-von-aus] but also the whither [Wo-für]” of phenomenology (SCM 109/99). Even if transcendental cognition is veridical in the “pre-existent” realm, what ultimately matters is how it surfaces in the natural attitude (SCM 109/99). The second—and more important—aspect of how phenomenology appears lies in what Fink called “secondary” or “non-proper” [uneigentliche] enworlding, by which he denotes “the summation of the constitutive process which places phenomenologizing itself into the world” (SCM 108/99; cf. 120, 142/110, 129). This is labeled “secondary” because it is the enworlding of the transcendental cognition of primary enworlding. But it is deemed “non-proper” because—significantly—it is a process with respect to which the onlooker is passive—it is a “being taken along” (SCM 127/116; cf. 125/113) that “does not rest upon its own activity” (SCM 119/109). Herein lies the real problem of transcendental illusion.³⁹

Secondary enworlding results from what Fink describes as a “self-concealment, a self-apperceptive constitution lying back over constituting life” (SCM 120/109). He does not spell this out (SCM 120/110), but his point is that the transcendental acts of sense-bestowal in virtue of which a phenomenological cognition appears necessarily exceed its scope. Any rigorous science must grasp its own functioning, and so, this situation is potentially devastating for phenomenology. Unlike primary enworlding, the transcendental origins of which remain “anonymous” and are “forgotten,” secondary enworlding is “precisely the worldly objectivation of knowing about transcendental origin,” including its own (SCM 128/116, emphasis added). This must be the case not only with the transcendental “ontification” inherent in its (proper) phenomenological cognition, but also the mundane ontification brought about by its (non-proper) enworlding. The latter must therefore involve a twofold transparency with respect to transcendental constitutive essence: “transparency with respect to the transcendental process of phenomenologizing,” and “transparency in the ‘appearance’ with respect to the constitutional processes that fashion that ‘appearance’ ” (SCM 128/117).

This is crucial. For this twofold transparency announces nothing less than the canon of phenomenological reason. As Fink put it (envisioning phenomenology at a more advanced stage): “This twofold transparency provides the phenomenological cognizer with the possibility of forming at any time an insight-based judgment regarding that which is only a truth with respect to worldly appearance, and that which is a truth that forms the proper transcendental essence of phenomenologizing” (SCM 128/117). Nothing more is required to overcome the transcendental illusion of “seeming truth”—not to abolish it, since that is not possible, but rather to ensure that it is not deceptive. For inasmuch as we have gained this twofold transparency with respect to it, “seeming truth is itself ‘sublated’ [‘aufgehoben’] in transcendental truth” (SCM 147/134). This means that the onlooker’s self-understanding preserves the appearance-truths of phenomenologizing by accounting for their mundane one-sidedness in terms of transcendental truth. All distinctions between apparent and genuine truth made on the basis of the canon of phenomenological reason would be characterized by this sort of dialectical Aufhebung (SCM 129f/118).

This points to Fink’s notion of the Absolute. To get to that, we need but ask: Granting the first, how is that second transparency possible? The answer lies in Fink’s account of “constructive phenomenology.”

According to Fink, phenomenology cannot limit its theoretical activity to regressive analysis of primary enworlding. This is because the onlooker cannot limit the scope of its investigation to the “internal horizon of constituting life”—which amounts to saying that it cannot adhere to Husserl’s “principle of all principles.” For regressive analysis of certain elements of the reductively given phenomenon of the world—for example, birth and death, psychological development, intersubjective relations, and world history—will necessarily founder, inasmuch as such phenomena prompt the onlooker to seek the transcendental sense of various forms of totality (SCM 71/63; cf. 12/11). But as transcendental constitution is always already unfolding within them, these totalities as such are not given (SCM 69f/62). This motivates a “movement out beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life” to an examination of what Fink calls its “ ‘external horizons’ [Aussenhorizonte]” (SCM 7/7). The resulting investigation, insofar as it “abandons the basis of transcendental ‘givenness’, no longer exhibits things intuitively, but necessarily proceeds,” as Fink put it, “constructively” (SCM 7/7).

Thus, it is not just that phenomenology is hampered by the difficulty of having an object that is non-existent, and thus mundanely inexpressible. It is also the case that its object as a whole is non-given, and thus even transcendentally unintuitable. Thus, in keeping with the structural echo of Kant’s first Critique, Fink characterizes constructive phenomenology as “transcendental dialectic.” For there is, he claims, a “material [sachliche] affinity” here, in that both deal with “the basic problem of the relation of the ‘given’ to the ‘non-given’ ” (SCM 71/64). But with respect to transcendental knowledge, there is a profound difference. For Fink’s construction is precisely meant to enable reason to go beyond the merely regulative role assigned to it by Kant, by granting it cognitive access to objects that are in principle non-given.

Although it belongs to one of the more provisional parts of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink’s claim that regressive inquiry is inadequate to fulfill the aims of phenomenology, which is consequently required to pursue constructive inquiry—his calling into question, that is, “the intuitional character of phenomenological cognition itself” (SCM 29/26)—is certainly one of the most striking features of the work. At first blush, it might seem to be a phenomenological non-starter. But recall the problem of secondary enworlding: if it is the case that transcendental life is composed exclusively of constituting and phenomenologizing activity, then it follows that the constitutive processes of secondary enworlding—which as such are, in principle, non-given—belong to the “external horizon” of reductive givenness, and that the transparency the onlooker gains with respect to them—and hence its own being—must be achieved through phenomenological construction. This is consistent with the “‘precedence’” [“Vorhergehen”] of the onlooker that distinguishes constructive from regressive phenomenology (SCM 72f/65f), and with the centrality of secondary enworlding to the “coincidence in Existence [Existenzdeckung] between the transcendental subject and its enworlded self-objectivation”—inquiry concerning which Fink explicitly placed in the province of constructive phenomenology (SCM 71/64).

We thus have the following: (i) the naïveté that the account of the transcendental onlooker is meant to overcome is transposed into the problem of the transparency of secondary enworlding. That is, that naïveté is solved by going outside the world, thus introducing the new problem of understanding how phenomenological cognition gets (back) into the world. (ii) Fink’s solution to this problem would necessarily be “constructive.” (iii) Constructive phenomenology thus plays a key role in arriving at the canon of phenomenological reason. But how would this be carried out non-arbitrarily in advance of the canonical distinction? Fink admittedly cannot shed much light on this. But we can glimpse where he was heading from his portrayal of phenomenology as “absolute science.”

Phenomenology as “absolute science”

Fink’s basic claim is that transcendental insights gained through the phenomenological reduction can be established scientifically only if the problem of transcendental illusion with respect to secondary enworlding is constructively overcome. A coherent system of phenomenological reason must be underpinned by a self-consciousness that comprehends completely the productive force of the project. The problem, however, is that the canonical distinction required for this constructive process can only come about through it. This circularity is redolent of the “dilemma of the criterion” attributed to Sextus Empiricus, and Fink proceeds in a way that situates phenomenology in close proximity to the speculative tradition of post-Kantian German Idealism, Hegel in particular (SCM 86, 173–9/77, 155–9; see also Bruzina 1986, 24; 1992, 279; cf. Westphal 1998). He does this by approaching secondary enworlding in terms of the complex “identity” of the phenomenologizing with the human and constituting “egos” (KS 123/116; cf. SCM 43/39)—within which, he noted, lie concealed “the most basic insights into the architectonic of the phenomenological system” (KS 123/116; cf. SCM 45–6/42). How is this “identity”—that is, the triadic “performance-structure” of the reduction—to be understood?

Fink answered this question in terms of the Absolute, understood as the inclusive, synthetic unity of the different moments of the performance structure of the reduction. Fink’s Absolute thus straddles the boundary of worldly ontology: “the Absolute is not . . . a homogeneous universal unity of that which is existent . . ., but precisely the comprehensive unity of the existent as such and the pre-existent” (SCM 157/143). Since it thus includes being as a moment, this unity itself is beyond being. Fink thus characterized the Absolute as meontic—a notion that occupied a central place in Fink’s thought during the period in question (Bruzina 1995, lv–lvii; 2004, 366f).

The unity of the Absolute can be thought of as joining world-constitution with both its being-for-itself (the onlooker as a moment of knowing) and with its self-apperceiving end-product (human being as a moment of believing). For there is an important sense even here—or especially, since world-constitution is teleologically directed at the world—in which knowledge implies belief. Yet, that is something the onlooker lacks. This is why the style of the canon of phenomenological reason is one of dialectical sublation rather than simple supersession of appearance-truth. Transcendental insight is meaningless if not tied to that which it surpasses. Thus, not unlike in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the appearance of phenomenologizing is recognized as a necessary constituent of the project. And the opposition between onlooker and human being is now comprehended as a “necessary antithesis in the synthetic unity of the Absolute” (SCM 166/150). The apparent contradiction in phenomenological agency is resolved through its being “sublated in the absolute truth that phenomenologizing is in itself a cognitive movement of the Absolute” (SCM 167/150; cf. 129/117f).

From the standpoint of the meontic Absolute, phenomenology can be seen as a “transformation [Verwandlung] of the ‘self’ ”: the reductive performance “doubles” the human ego by bringing its transcendental ground to self-evidence, and transcendental reflection reunites these at a “higher” level by realizing in self-consciousness the “identity” of the whole (KS 123/117). Thus, the “ ‘concrete’ concept of the ‘phenomenologizing subject’ ” is the “dialectical unity” of the two “antithetic moments”—that is, “transcendental subjectivity ‘appearing’ in the world” (SCM 127/116; cf. 147, 157, 163/134, 142, 147). As the science of enworlding, phenomenology thus amounts to the theory of the appearance of the Absolute in being. This is, in a sense, the “self-cognition” of the Absolute, and phenomenology is, accordingly, “absolute science”—the absolute self-understanding of the Absolute (SCM 169/152).

The problematic circularity of the onlooker’s self-understanding would be worked out within this absolute self-referentiality. The Sixth Cartesian Meditation is short on details, but the idea is that all metaphysical questions are answerable, and that transcendental illusion can, in principle, be fully mastered theoretically in a new dimension of transcendental philosophy which, surpassing intuitional givenness, would grasp the constitutedness of human worldly finitude on the basis of a speculative sort of “intellectual intuition,”⁴⁰ “thereby taking it back into the infinite essence of spirit” (KS 155/144f). Such is what the Sixth Cartesian Meditation anticipates as the only methodologically coherent form of phenomenology, and Fink glosses it as “a meontic philosophy of absolute spirit” (SCM 183/1).

Merleau-Ponty’s response to Fink

Although the foregoing might seem to bear no resemblance to anything found in Phenomenology of Perception, there are, as we shall see, some important formal similarities. But at the same time, analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s own conception of the “phenomenology of phenomenology” will show that his view of phenomenological methodology—or his own operative “idea of a transcendental theory of method”—differs radically from that presented by Fink in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. For it becomes clear that it is based upon a fundamentally different orientation, one that sees phenomenology as participating actively in the ongoing historical realization of the world, rather than spectating passively upon a transcendental process that is always already determined from the empirical standpoint. But it is also the case that this raises some new methodological questions concerning the nature and possibility of the phenomenological reduction in Phenomenology of Perception—questions that are sufficiently important yet disconcerting as to motivate a certain rereading of that text.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology

When we recall that Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior, completed by 1938 but published in 1942, concluded with the methodological desideratum to “define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224, emphasis added), and when we take seriously Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Phenomenology of Perception was “only a preliminary study,” the intention of which was to “define a method for getting closer to present and living reality” (PrP 68/25, emphasis added), we can recognize that the latter work, far from exhibiting any sort of reticence about methodological issues, was, like the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, principally concerned with formulating the idea of a transcendental theory of method.

This claim may seem surprising and implausible. But some reflection upon the overall structure of Phenomenology of Perception can, at least to some extent, make it seem fairly unremarkable. Simply consider the way the text progresses through the different sections: in the Introduction, critical consideration of the “traditional prejudices” of “objective thought” [la pensée objective] in its empiricist and intellectualist forms serves to motivate a return to the “phenomenal field” [le champ phénoménal] (PhP 64–77; cf SC 222 n2/248 n40). Part I of the text is then devoted to investigating the paradigm of pre-objective experience, namely, experience of the body, that is, of one’s own lived body, on the basis of which—or, more precisely, on the basis of the claim that “the theory of the body is already a theory of perception” (PhP 235–9)—Merleau-Ponty can then lay out in Part II his phenomenological account of “the perceived world” [le monde perçu]. This is not the place to discuss any of this in detail. For immediate purposes, the point is simply that while Merleau-Ponty may nowhere provide in Phenomenology of Perception a concise statement of his methodology, it could be the case that such a statement is in fact writ large and demonstrated across the structure of the work as a whole.

This sort of view makes a good deal of sense—at least up to the end of the second Part of Merleau-Ponty’s book. But there is the matter of Part III (comprising the chapters on the cogito, temporality, and freedom). We need to ask: why is there another major section over and above the account of the perceived world?

That Phenomenology of Perception was ultimately concerned with phenomenological method, and moreover, that it was structurally conceived specifically in response to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, is evinced by the fact that, in contrast to “direct description,” Merleau-Ponty refers to Part III of the book as a “phenomenology of phenomenology” (PhP 419). This is clearly set off as a distinct methodological project, its point being to use the phenomenological descriptions laid out in Parts I and II as an opportunity “for defining a more radical comprehension and reflection than objective thought” (PhP 419, emphasis added). This task of “second-order reflection” is explicitly announced at the end of Part II, but it is prefigured throughout the work, including at the end of the Preface (PhP xvi), and at the end of the Introduction (PhP 74–7). There, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that “the meditating Ego” is essentially situated within the perspective of a particular concrete subject, and that radical reflection must take this into account. “We must not only adopt a reflective attitude,” therefore, “but also reflect on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding, and which therefore belongs to its definition” (PhP 75).

The aim of Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of phenomenology” is thus to validate the descriptive account of Parts I and II as a philosophical contribution, rather than a mere “psychological curiosity” (PrP 55/19). For on its own, that account does not rule out there being a realm of pure thought over and above perception, and hence, the possibility of establishing a system of truth capable of disambiguating perceptual experience and resolving the contradictions and paradoxes that Merleau-Ponty had described. In other words, the point of Part III—developed in and through the chapters on the cogito, temporality, and freedom—is methodological: to show the impossibility of an absolute science in Fink’s sense.⁴¹ Whereas Fink had claimed that “to know the world by returning to a ‘transcendence’ which once again contains [einbehält] the world within it signifies the realization of a transcendental knowledge of the world [bedeutet eine transzendentale Welterkenntnis realisieren],” and that “in this sense alone is phenomenology ‘transcendental philosophy’ ” (KS 106/100, translation modified), for his part, Merleau-Ponty made the very contrary claim that “a philosophy becomes transcendental, that is, radical . . . not by postulating the total making-explicit [explicitation] of knowledge, but rather by recognizing this presumption of reason as the fundamental philosophical problem” (PhP 76).

Although he agreed with Fink about the methodological limits of regressive phenomenology, it was not the intuitional but rather the cognitive character of phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty restricted. His interpretation of phenomenology is therefore radically different. Tellingly, he took his bearings, not (like Fink) from the speculative and systematic Hegel, but rather from the young Hegel—whom Merleau-Ponty viewed in decidedly existential terms (SNS 109–21/63–70) and conflated rather freely with Marx. He thus regarded the emergence of phenomenological philosophy—Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding [Verweltlichung]—as a special case of the emergence of self-conscious historical collectivities in general, which is essentially the idea of the “realization” [Verwirklichung] of philosophy that Marx proposed in his early critique of (the “older,” i.e., speculative and systematic) Hegel.⁴² Both are matters of transformatively overcoming the silence of a “multiple solipsism” [solipsisme à plusieurs] by establishing “effective communication” between isolated individuals (PhP 412; cf. 76). Merleau-Ponty thus dismissed Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding. For in saying—as he repeatedly did, including at the end of Phenomenology of Perception—that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy [se réalise en se détruisant comme philosophie séparée]” (PhP 520, emphasis added),⁴³ he embraced the claim that philosophy cannot be realized without being “transcended” [aufgehoben], that is, without being integrated with reality through transformative praxis (cf. Marx 1975b, 181, 187). In other words, Merleau-Ponty founded the scientificity of phenomenology on the same “productivity” that makes historical agency in general possible (cf. SNS 229/129). It is thus a praxiological idea of method that Merleau-Ponty developed in response to Fink, a view based on the claim that transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity—a claim upon which he repeatedly insisted⁴⁴—and hence that the nexus of concrete intercorporeal praxis is itself the absolute.⁴⁵

Ultimately, it is this claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology was intended to substantiate. For this is what underlies the method that he was aiming to define, which involves a sort of “plunge” into “present and living reality.”⁴⁶ As he says in no uncertain terms, “the solution of all problems of transcendence is to be sought in the thickness of the pre-objective present” (PhP 495). That is, it is here that all philosophical problems will be resolved, insofar as they are legitimately resolvable. This qualification is crucial, for Merleau-Ponty did not maintain that all philosophical problems that can be posed are resoluble (the world itself is, recall, en déça des solutions). In an especially important footnote at the very end of Part II of Phenomenology of Perception, he presented a dilemma with respect to Husserl to the effect that either second-order phenomenological reflection clarifies the world completely, in which case first-order description would be superfluous; or else second-order reflection can at best only remove some but not all obscurities left by description (PhP 419). Inasmuch as it is agreed that phenomenology must begin in the natural attitude, then, first-order description is not superfluous, and we must opt for the latter prong and accept a certain degree of opacity. This has the implication that Merleau-Ponty rejected in principle the possibility of complete theoretical transparency with respect to the enworlding of phenomenology—precisely that for which Fink sought a “constructive” solution.

This is crucial. The Merleau-Pontian absolute is insuperably ambiguous, yet it is here that the problems of transcendence are to be resolved (PhP 418f). According to Merleau-Ponty, it is precisely the “contradictory” nature of human intercorporeal involvement, our being constituted and (contra Fink) constituting, that enables phenomenological achievements, and so, this must not be ontologically written off or sublated away. What we see, then, is that by aiming to “discover time beneath the subject [and to] link the paradox of time to those of the body, the world, the thing, and others,” Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology poses a deflationary argument against Fink. The idea is to dissolve the dilemma of either “believing our descriptions” or “knowing what we are talking about” by showing that, beyond the paradoxical intercorporeal involvement revealed through descriptive analysis, “there is nothing to understand” (PhP 419). Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s account thus leaves no “uncomprehended residue” (cf. SCM 25/23)—none, that is, that could be comprehended theoretically. It thereby upholds Husserl’s contention that phenomenology provides an “ultimate understanding of the world”—an understanding behind which “there is nothing more that can be sensefully inquired for, nothing more to understand” (Husserl 1969, 242)—while also obviating the need for constructive phenomenology as conceived by Fink.

Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to maintain the intuitional basis of phenomenological insight. But recognizing its essential perspectivity, he decoupled intuition from apodictic truth. This decoupling is tied to his notion of “le préjugé du monde”—the naïve assumption, upon which objective thought is based, that a fully determinate world obtains (PhP 11, 62, 296, 316). For Merleau-Ponty, there is no such world—not yet, anyway—and therefore, no such determinateness is being constituted. As an active intervention into an “unfinished world,” phenomenology has no privileged epistemological guarantee. The world and truth are à faire—to be made. For Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical validity of phenomenological claims accrues from their intersubjective appropriation and ratification—prior to which they are, strictly speaking, non-sense (SNS 32/19; PhP 491, 509).⁴⁷ Even—or especially—in the case of a theoretically detached onlooker. Thus, whereas in Fink’s meontic interpretation, phenomenology’s basic methodological problematic is structured in terms of the relation between Sein and Vor-Sein, Merleau-Ponty framed it in entirely human terms, such that “the question is ultimately one of understanding . . . the relation between sense and non-sense” (PhP 490).

Though considerable, such differences do betray some important formal affinities underlying the respective positions of Fink and Merleau-Ponty. This is particularly true with regard to outdoing the uncritically limited transcendental approach characteristic of Kantianism by ceasing to take the world for granted and inculcating a pathos of philosophical wonder that effects a certain kind of extramundane standpoint, that is, a standpoint that is without the world. Such is the core of their respective views of the reduction. Yet, there is at least one substantive claim on which Fink and Merleau-Ponty would agree entirely: that a complete reduction is not humanly possible. They agree on this point, but diverge completely with respect to its implications, with Fink retaining the possibility of the complete reduction and Merleau-Ponty insisting conversely on phenomenology as a human practice. The respective ways in which they understand what it would mean to adopt an extramundane standpoint thus differ drastically, since for Fink, there is a fully determinate world, albeit one whose origins remain shrouded in mystery, whereas for Merleau-Ponty, such a determinate world is the object, not simply of a naïve belief, that is, a true belief naïvely held, but of a naïve prejudice, that is, a false belief naïvely held, the placing in abeyance of which is the key to the reduction and thus to a truly transcendental standpoint. He thereby implies that even with regard to the world, Fink has an insufficiently radical sense of philosophical wonder.⁴⁸

Inasmuch as it denies the existence of a fully determinate world, then, there is no basis for reading le préjugé du monde as understood by Merleau-Ponty as bearing any substantive similarity to Fink’s notion of Weltbefangenheit (cf. Bruzina 2002, 194). We are not imprisoned, ontologically or otherwise, in the world. Merleau-Ponty had already shown in The Structure of Behavior that the nature of human existence is to project itself beyond given situations, that it fundamentally involves an orientation to the possible, even if this lies “beyond the world”—indeed, “beyond any milieu” (SC 189f/175f, 245n97, emphasis added). Thus, whereas for Fink, Weltbefangenheit is a necessary condition of human existence, for Merleau-Ponty, it could at most be taken as describing the natural attitude in normal cases. Nor did Merleau-Ponty agree with Fink’s claim that the phenomenological reduction represents the first breakthrough (SCM 124/113). Rather, it is precisely the capacity of going “beyond any milieu” exhibited by certain forms of non-phenomenological activity that phenomenology itself relies on. Interestingly, what these have in common is a certain structural (but not etiological) filiation with schizophrenia. Concerning phenomenology, therefore, whereas Fink posited an Ich-Spaltung (splitting of the I) at the transcendental level,⁴⁹ Merleau-Ponty held that such is precisely what can and must occur in the concrete. Hence his claim, for example, that “the highest form of reason borders on madness [déraison]” (SNS 9/4; cf. 121/70).

This is why Merleau-Ponty will describe the suspension of le préjugé du monde as a venturesome staking of one’s life. It requires the capacity for a kind of selfless engagement which, not unlike death, imposes distance from vital egoic particularity in the direction of human universality (SNS 115ff/67). As we shall see, this is the standpoint of “the living subject, man as productivity” (PhP 171, emphasis added; cf. SNS 328f/185f; HT xli/xlv), that affords the transcendentally disclosive experience of the indeterminacy of the pregiven world.

This kind of selfless engagement clearly bears a formal similarity to Fink’s idea of “un-humanization.” But in substantive terms, it differs markedly. For Merleau-Ponty’s radical emphasis on the contingent emergence of the world is more phenomenologically consistent than Fink’s overarching Absolute. This is because even though Fink does not take the world for granted, he does take for granted that there is a world to be taken for granted. That is, he does not say uncritically that the world is there. But in taking for granted its determinacy, he does thereby presume that the constitution of the world “is” there (i.e., “pre-existently”). In an important way, then, Fink just shifts the locus of uncritical dogmatism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, le préjugé du monde is just that—a prejudice. The determinate world is not, but rather is à faire, to be made, and the philosopher interested in truth is therefore required to engage in normatively-oriented creative activity that is necessarily fraught with uncertainty and possible failure.

This is the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to the Finkian onlooker. Rather than severing from the mundane, the phenomenologist plunges into its thickness. In contrast to Fink’s ideal of non-participation, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology involves an intensification of constitutive participation. In terms of productivity, he thus associates phenomenology with activities of creative transgression, those which generate from within themselves the ability to push the bounds of sense and expand the domain of reason,⁵⁰ albeit without any pre-given metaphysical guarantees of success.⁵¹ Although he also refers to revolutionary politics, in general, the kind of activity Merleau-Ponty had in mind can best be termed art. Thus, whereas Fink had stated in no uncertain terms that the productivity of the phenomenological onlooker is “not comparable to any mode of productivity pregiven in a worldly way” (SCM 86/76, emphasis added), Merleau-Ponty replies—unmistakably—that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing [préalable] truth, but, like art, the realization [réalisation] of a truth” (PhP xv, emphasis added). There could not be a more concise statement of Merleau-Ponty’s methodological departure from Fink.

But he goes further. Consider how Merleau-Ponty glosses the upshot of Phenomenology of Perception. In explicit and unequivocal opposition to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Merleau-Ponty wrote that “[t]he phenomenological world is not the making-explicit [explicitation] of a pre-existing being [un être préalable], but the laying down [la fondation] of being” (PhP xv, emphasis added). Directly challenging Fink’s view, Merleau-Ponty claimed that “the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ [le « spectateur impartial » (uninteressierter Zuschauer)] do not return to an already given rationality [une rationalité déjà donnée].” Rather—and here Merleau-Ponty quotes Fink again but slightly out of context (see note 33) —“they ‘establish themselves’ [« s’établissent »],⁵² and establish it [rationality], through an initiative which has no guarantee in being, and whose justification rests entirely on the actual power that it gives us for taking responsibility for our history [le pouvoir effectif qu’elle nous donne d’assumer notre histoire]” (PhP xv, emphasis added).

As a human endeavor in an unfinished, indeterminate world, phenomenology is fittingly dramatic—and dramatically different from Fink’s portrayal of the onlooker’s theoretical experience: “We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history [notre histoire] through reflection, as well as through a decision whereby we commit [engageons] our lives, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act that proves itself in practice [un acte violent qui se vérifie en s’exerçant]” (PhP xvi).⁵³

Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

Madness, art, violence—such is how Merleau-Ponty depicted the methodological basis of his existential reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology. The above statements, and many others like them, are familiar to readers of Phenomenology of Perception. But they are usually not read in quite the way they were intended nor with the full gravity that they possess in the context of this work. For they are typically taken as rhetorical flourishes redolent of certain impetuous aspects of the immediate postwar atmosphere in Paris They add a certain polemical spice to the text, but nothing of philosophical substance—the dish can, it is assumed, be served more blandly. This view is, however, quite mistaken. Consideration of “the idea of a transcendental theory of method” that Fink had outlined in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, and recognition that Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with it was the pivotal moment on the philosophical trajectory through which he overcame the methodological impasse with which The Structure of Behavior concluded, make it clear that what Merleau-Ponty was expressing in these claims was nothing less than his own meta-theory concerning the possibility of the transcendental phenomenological reduction. An account, that is, not so much of the reduction per se, but of the transcendental conditions of its performance—for example, the nature of its agency, and of the “productivity” that makes it possible—and hence of the possibility of the reduction serving in a viable way as the central methodological maneuver of genuine philosophical inquiry.

It is far from clear, however, how we are to square this fundamental and high-minded aim with the heady and provocative content of Merleau-Ponty’s statements. It is unclear, in other words, precisely how to understand the existential alternative that Merleau-Ponty posed to Fink’s conception of the reduction’s “performance-structure” [Vollzugsstruktur], and to the role played in his account by a form of “intellectual intuition” that goes beyond any sort of phenomenal givenness. If not the theoretical experience of a non-participating onlooker, then upon what exactly are the phenomenological results of Phenomenology of Perception based, who or what is responsible for them, and how are they justified? What secures their rational epistemic status? What are the methodological commitments concerning the agency of existential phenomenology that ensure its veritable philosophical credentials? How, in short, is philosophy realized within the terms of this project? Lacking tangible answers to these questions, it remains unclear whether any genuine philosophical insight is, in fact, achieved in this text—and this, not in some ahistorical idealist sense of philosophical insight that Merleau-Ponty rightly rejected, but precisely in the sense that he did intend—a sense which still implies a progressive movement toward truth understood in universal terms, and which as such, by “bringing rationality and the absolute down to earth,” would supply “the remedy for skepticism and pessimism” (PrP 43, 70/13, 26).

The purpose of this Preface has been to motivate provocatively paying renewed interpretive attention to Phenomenology of Perception by showing that central methodological questions remain unanswered, and that this situation places a serious question mark over the work as a whole. To dispel this questionableness, we need to come to terms with the idea of “the realization of philosophy” as implied by Merleau-Ponty in his claim that “philosophy realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy.” We need to understand, in other words, the dialectical conception of phenomenological method that enabled Merleau-Ponty to overcome transcendental phenomenology’s need for what Fink had termed “secondary enworlding.”

In the chapters to follow, I take up this task by approaching Phenomenology of Perception from its very end, problematizing the textual fact of its culminating with a set of lines drawn from Pilote de guerre and offering a methodological explanation for it. This amounts to investigating Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “heroism” and its role in his existential reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, an undertaking that will shed valuable light on the methodological commitments operative in Phenomenology of Perception—light which will reciprocally illuminate and corroborate the claims sketched out in the foregoing discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s critical encounter with Fink.

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A final word or two before taking the plunge. It may be wondered how it could possibly be the case that issues of the significance and magnitude that I am suggesting have evaded scholarly attention for so long. To this sort of worry, there are three main replies. First, as mentioned, the simple fact of the publication history of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation goes a long way toward explaining the absence in the literature of any serious discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s response to it, and of the deeper stakes of his own phenomenology of phenomenology. Although that text has now been available for over two decades, as far as Merleau-Ponty scholarship is concerned, the significance of its appearance was obscured by the tacit assumption, alluded to earlier, that all significant avenues of research on Phenomenology of Perception had already been explored.

Second, but not unrelated to this first point, it is also the case that the lines drawn from Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre with which Phenomenology of Perception ends have never elicited any critical scrutiny within Merleau-Ponty scholarship. It is, as we shall see, very perplexing that the book ends as it does, and some scholars over the years may well have felt this perplexity. But without access to Fink’s text and the methodological problematic that it posed, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to formulate a compelling philosophical explanation. Thus, along with many other methodological statements, even the very zenith of Phenomenology of Perception has typically been wrongly discounted as a philosophically inconsequential rhetorical flourish (more on this below).

The third reply by way of assuaging the doubt that what I propose to say about Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology could possibly have been overlooked hitherto has to do with a more general feature of the relevant scholarship. And this point will invoke the political dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought—specifically, the existential form of Marxism that he espoused in the postwar period, and the fact, broached above, that this is the source and inspiration for his idea of “the realization of philosophy.” Although in earlier years it was more common for commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s work to address both its philosophical and political aspects, it is currently the case, and has been for some time, that Merleau-Ponty scholarship is marked by a crisp division of labor between those who study Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenological philosopher and those (far fewer) who study him as a political philosopher. By way of illustration, consider that neither of the two most widely-cited philosophical treatments of Merleau-Ponty’s work (Dillon 1988; Barbaras 2004) make any significant reference to Marx or to Marxism at all, while the two most important studies of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy (Whiteside 1988; Coole 2007) are both written by political scientists who do not have a specialized understanding of Husserlian phenomenology. In other words, although his works receive a considerable amount of scholarly attention, the intimate connection between Marx and Husserl, or more generally between Marxism and phenomenology, that was fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s postwar position tends to fall systematically between the cracks.

As with the idea that there is nothing fundamentally new to say about Phenomenology of Perception, there is a widespread tacit assumption at work here to the effect that, however strong his Marxist proclivities may have been, especially in the immediate postwar years, for Merleau-Ponty, Marxism was nonetheless theoretically secondary to phenomenology. This assumption does not imply that for Merleau-Ponty Marxism was entirely separate from phenomenology—there is no question that he brought the latter to bear upon problems facing the former, that is, that he explored the idea of a phenomenological Marxism. But it is the point of that assumption to deny the converse claim, that is, that Merleau-Ponty brought Marxism to bear upon problems facing phenomenology. And this denial has the implication that any references to Marxism found within his phenomenological work are philosophically inconsequential, however interesting they might be from the perspective of political theory, say, or intellectual or cultural history.

It is, however, a corollary claim of this book, albeit a major one, that this denial is incorrect, and that the assumption in question is consequently false. For in considering the outstanding methodological issues surrounding Phenomenology of Perception, and approaching them by way of the exegetical problem of Exupérian heroism, what we shall find is that alongside his efforts to give Marxism a phenomenological reinterpretation, Merleau-Ponty also drew from Marxism in his reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology. In particular, as we will see, certain of the methodological commitments operative in the latter are based in a philosophy of history of Hegelian-Marxist inspiration. Contrary to the assumption of the theoretical secondariness of Marxism, then, at least in the immediate postwar period, Marxism and phenomenology stood on a roughly equal footing in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as essentially interdependent and complementary projects. It was within the terms of this intersection with Marxism that Merleau-Ponty sought to solve the methodological problems of phenomenology. Just as his Marxism was phenomenological, then, there is a specific sense in which Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology was—at its core and not merely in a superficial way—“Marxist.”

The resolution of the methodological questions concerning Phenomenology of Perception can thus be achieved only on the basis of a unified comprehension of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar philosophical and political thought. Inasmuch as attempts at such a comprehension tend to predate the availability of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, the claim that such questions could indeed be real and important yet still outstanding is far less implausible than it may initially seem. Had Fink’s text been available to earlier generations of Merleau-Ponty scholars, the situation may well have been different. But given the artificial isolation from his Marxist concerns in which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological work tends to be approached nowadays, plus the fact that Fink’s text is still not a major point of reference for philosophical commentary, it is actually not at all surprising that the issues in question remain unexplored and even, so to speak, off the radar of most contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholars.

Going against this trend by recovering the essential and vital connection between Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical and political thought, only now with a full appreciation of his response to Fink, the following investigation of the methodological significance of Exupérian heroism will serve to disclose and foreground the praxiological understanding of transcendental philosophy that is implicated in Merleau-Ponty’s existential reformulation of phenomenology. It will thus begin to recover what I shall call the “militant” dimension of his thought, a dimension that has been lost or overlooked by virtually all scholarly commentary.⁵⁴ The new perspective that results will thus cast important new light on how Merleau-Ponty initially oriented himself in the transcendental tradition. But this light will not necessarily be philosophically flattering, and it may expose certain problematic or contentious aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology that are typically unrecognized or glossed over—often with palpable obsequiousness—in existing scholarship. The following discussion is therefore intended to motivate and lay some of the interpretive groundwork for a critical rereading of Merleau-Ponty’s work. This applies first of all to Phenomenology of Perception itself, in particular with respect to the methodological commitments to which the phenomenological descriptions therein presented are inescapably bound. But it also meant to play a prolegomenal role with regard to a critical rereading of the Merleau-Pontian oeuvre as a whole, inasmuch as its development was driven by a self-critical attempt on the part of Merleau-Ponty to work out more satisfactorily the philosophical and methodological grounds of his phenomenological project.