MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE

FOR THE PERPLEXED

ERIC MATTHEWS
CONTINUUM International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038

First published 2006

www.continuumbooks.com

© Eric Matthews 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Eric Matthews has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0-8264-8531-6 (hardback) 0-8264-8532-4 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Matthews, Eric, 1936–
Merleau-Ponty : a guide for the perplexed / Eric Matthews.
p. cm. – (The guides for the perplexed series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8264–8531–6 (hardback) –
ISBN 0–8264–8532–4 (pbk.)
1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961.
I. Title. II. Guides for the perplexed.
B2430.M3764M376 2006
194–dc22 2005037797

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
 CONTENTS

Preface vii

1 Phenomenology 1
Introducing Merleau-Ponty 1
The turn to phenomenology 4
The phenomenological reduction 9
What Merleau-Ponty means by ‘phenomenolgy’ 13
2 Perception 21
Empiricism 21
‘Intellectualism’ 30
Phenomenology and the unity of the experienced world 33
3 Embodiment 38
The roots of objectivism 38
The limits of objectivism 42
The body as subject 47
4 Behaviour 57
Reductionism 57
Against ‘causal thinking’ 65
5 Being Human 76
Science and humanity 76
Heidegger and Sartre 80
Back to Merleau-Ponty 87
6 Time 95
Space and time in nature 95
Human time 99
Becoming me 102
Merleau-Ponty and Freud 108

v
7 Other People, Society, History 114
The problem of the other 114
The social world 119
Merleau-Ponty and Marxism 126
8 Art and Perception 135
Art, truth and Marxism 135
The other arts 140
Art and philosophy 145

Bibliography 152
Index 155
 PREFACE

Merleau-Ponty is not an easy author to understand, but he more than

repays the effort. The difficulty comes, not from any wilful obscurity,
but from the sheer subtlety and complexity of his thought. This book
is an attempt to guide readers through that complexity. It works by
introducing some of Merleau-Ponty’s main themes step by step. Its
structure is meant to be something like a staircase: by the time readers
reach the top stair, they should have a better grasp than when they first
set foot on the bottom stair. What looks like the same theme may
appear in more than one chapter, but each time it will be in a different
context, which should hopefully add a fresh element to understand-
ing. The only way to read the book, therefore, is linear – from the first
page to the last page, not skipping anything in between.
Space does not allow me to cover all of Merleau-Ponty’s concepts,
nor would it be helpful to try to do so. What I have tried to do is to
discuss the central core of his thought, in the hope that this will enable
readers to explore further for themselves. The Bibliography at the end
is meant to help with that exploration. In particular, I have said very
little about the developments at the very end of Merleau-Ponty’s short
life, which were published only after his death. This is because they
are necessarily unfinished work, and we cannot know where he would
have taken these ideas if he had lived. Better to concentrate on the
acknowledged texts published during his lifetime, which anyway
contain his most original contribution to philosophy.
Finally, I must express my thanks to Hywel Evans, formerly of
Continuum, who first encouraged me to submit a proposal for this
book. I must also thank my wife Hellen for her patience with me
while I wrote it; and my friend and former student Dr Martin Wylie
who shares my enthusiasm for Merleau-Ponty and has contributed
more to my thinking than he is aware.

vii
 CHAPTER 1

PHENOMENOLOGY

INTRODUCING MERLEAU-PONTY

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) is much less well-known, espe-

cially in the English-speaking world, than his contemporary and
sometime friend Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre is known even to many
people who have not studied his philosophy because of his novels,
plays, short stories and essays, and because he was a leading public
figure in French society for many years in the mid-twentieth century.
Merleau-Ponty wrote no novels or plays; and although, like most
French intellectuals, he participated actively in general cultural life,
he for the most part followed a typical French academic career. But
his philosophy is not that of a cloistered professor, of interest only to
other professionals. Many would say that he is at least as important
and relevant a thinker as Sartre, and perhaps more original and pro-
found. Like most philosophers (including Sartre) he went out of
fashion after his death, though many psychologists continued to find
stimulation in his ideas. There are signs now of a revival of interest
in what he has to say about a range of philosophical questions. In
particular, the debate about mind and consciousness seems to have
caught up with him. There is no denying that his often dense prose,
as well as the sheer subtlety of his thoughts, makes him a difficult
philosopher to get to grips with; but I shall try in this book to provide
a guide to at least the main outlines of his thought, in such a way as
to show that it is worth making the effort.
A brief account of his life may help to put him in context. Like
Sartre, he studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure
(ENS), one of the most distinguished higher-education institutions
in France, in the late 1920s. It was at the ENS that the two men first

1
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

met, though they were not particularly close at that time. Their
teachers included some of the best-known French philosophers
of the time, such as Léon Brunschvicg and Georges Gurvitch. As
a result, Merleau-Ponty was well-grounded in the history of western
philosophy, as interpreted by these men, but also in contemporary
developments. In particular, he attended Gurvitch’s lectures on
Husserl’s phenomenology, and probably heard Husserl himself
lecturing in Paris in 1929 (the significance of this will be explained
later).
After graduating from the ENS, Merleau-Ponty taught philosophy
for a few years in lycées (secondary schools), did a year’s research on
perception and then, in 1935, took up a junior post in the ENS which
he occupied until the outbreak of the Second World War. While
there, he completed a doctoral thesis which was later to become
his first book, published in 1942, whose English title is The Structure
of Behaviour. The main influence on him in writing this book was
the ‘Gestalt’ school of psychologists, who emphasized the organized
nature of human experience: our perceptions were not, according
to them, broken up into atomistic units called ‘sensations’, but were
structured wholes in which the meaning of individual elements
depended on their relation to the whole. Merleau-Ponty, however,
thought that the Gestaltists were wrong to think of this as an empir-
ical psychological hypothesis. It was, according to him, a philosoph-
ical thesis about the essential nature of human experience. But his
interest in Gestalt ideas continued even in his later works.
Other influences on him in the first phase of his thinking in the
1930s were the new French interest in Hegel which developed after
the First World War, and (connected with that) the ‘western Marxism’
which founded itself on the rediscovered early writings of Marx.
Merleau-Ponty, like many young French intellectuals, was drawn to
the lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which were given by
a Russian émigré called Alexandre Kojève in Paris in the late 1930s.
Kojève’s interpretation read Hegel from an essentially Marxist per-
spective, or, it could equally well be said, treated Marxism as an
expression of Hegelianism. This ‘Hegelianized’ Marxism was similar
to that of Marxist thinkers like the Hungarian Georg Lukàcs, whose
version of Marxism was far less mechanistic than that of official
Communism, and so far more acceptable to idealistic young western
left-wingers like Merleau-Ponty. (For further discussion of Merleau-
Ponty’s Marxism, see Chapter 7).

2
 PHENOMENOLOGY

With the outbreak of war, Merleau-Ponty was called up as an

infantry officer, but was demobilized when the French army was
defeated by the invading German forces, and went back to teaching
philosophy in lycées in Paris. He met Sartre again, and this time
became much closer to him, when the two men helped to form a
small, and not very effective (by Sartre’s own admission), Resistance
group called Socialisme et Liberté (Socialism and Liberty) which
tried to make its own small contribution to opposing the German
Occupation of France. The group broke up after a year’s existence,
but Merleau-Ponty and Sartre remained friends and colleagues.
They shared the same general left-wing outlook on politics and
society, and in 1945 jointly founded the leading French literary and
political periodical Les Temps modernes (Modern Times). Both were
editors and directors of the journal, though Merleau-Ponty wrote
most of the editorials (which he did not sign) and took overall
control of the magazine’s political line. In 1948, Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre founded a new socialist political party, non-Communist
though not anti-Communist, called the Rassemblement Démocra-
tique Révolutionnaire (RDR), whose name means the Revolutionary
Democratic Grouping. The party, however, was something of a
failure: it did not last very long, and did not attract enough support
on the Left to act as a serious rival to the huge French Communist
Party (PCF).
In 1945, Merleau-Ponty published what many would regard as his
most important book, Phenomenology of Perception, which again
was originally a doctoral thesis. (We shall return to this work later in
the chapter, and in much of the rest of the book, since it consid-
ers virtually all of the major themes of his thought.) It was also in
1945 that Merleau-Ponty made the move from teaching philosophy
in lycées to university teaching, when he became a Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Lyon. In 1949, he moved to become
Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy at the Sorbonne, in Paris;
and finally, in 1952 he was appointed to a Chair in Philosophy at the
Collège de France, also in Paris, a post which he held for the rest of
his life.
All this time, he was writing and speaking; about philosophy, of
course, but also about a range of other subjects including politics, art,
literature and the cinema. In 1947, he published a political work,
Humanism and Terror, which reveals him struggling to come to terms
with the revelations of Soviet repression which were increasingly

3
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

reaching the West, while holding on to a belief in Marxist socialism.

These misgivings about Soviet Communism increased in the next few
years, and were one of the primary causes of the quarrel between
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in 1953. (Sartre, in strong disagreement
with Merleau-Ponty, continued to hold to the view that support
for the Soviet Union was necessary if one were to avoid betraying
the French working class, most of whom supported the pro-Soviet
French Communist Party.) Merleau-Ponty resigned as editor of
Les Temps modernes, and thereafter took little active part in politics,
though he retained an essentially left-wing stance. His book
Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, expresses his later atti-
tudes to politics, as well as containing a long attack on Sartre’s polit-
ical position. (The two men were reconciled to some extent before
Merleau-Ponty’s death.)
In 1948, he gave a series of radio talks on his own approach to phil-
osophy, the text of which has now been published, both in French
and English (the title of the English translation is The World of
Perception). He wrote numerous articles about politics and general
cultural topics: some of these were published in book form in his col-
lections Sense and Non-Sense and Signs. His inaugural lecture at the
Collège de France was published, along with other essays, as In Praise
of Philosophy. And, very importantly, towards the end of his life, he
was working on two books, both uncompleted at the time of his
death, and published only posthumously, in which his thinking took
a distinctive new turn. These books are known in English as The Prose
of the World and The Visible and the Invisible. (For full details of all
the works mentioned, and of other works by Merleau-Ponty, see the
Bibliography at the end of this book.) On 3 May 1961, at the tragi-
cally early age of 53 and (as the uncompleted works show) with much
still to say, Merleau-Ponty died of a heart attack.

THE TURN TO PHENOMENOLOGY

Some of the influences on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking have been men-

tioned already: Hegel and a Hegelianized version of Marxism and
Gestalt psychology in particular. Other influences came from con-
temporary French philosophers, such as Henri Bergson and Gabriel
Marcel, and from the general tradition of western philosophy, above
all Descartes and Kant. But by far the most significant influence on
his development was the ‘phenomenological’ movement initiated by

4
 PHENOMENOLOGY

Edmund Husserl. It has already been mentioned that Merleau-

Ponty heard lectures by Georges Gurvitch on phenomenology while
he was still a student at the ENS, and that he was probably present
at the lecture Husserl himself gave in Paris in 1929. But what really
‘converted’ him to phenomenology seems to have been his discovery
of Husserl’s later thought towards the end of the 1930s. In 1939,
an article appeared in the journal Revue internationale de philosophie
on fresh developments in Husserl’s thinking at the end of his life
(Husserl had died in 1938). When Merleau-Ponty read this article,
he was so impressed that he immediately made arrangements to visit
the newly established Husserl Archive at the Catholic University of
Louvain (now Leuven) in Belgium. A Catholic priest from Louvain,
Father von Breda, had managed to rescue Husserl’s manuscripts
from Nazi Germany, where Husserl had in the last years of his life
faced the same persecution as other Jews, and where his work was
consequently in danger. In Louvain, Merleau-Ponty made a deep
study of these writings, most of which were at that time still unpub-
lished, though some of the most important of them had been pub-
lished in 1936 as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology. His work from then on was deeply marked by his
understanding of phenomenology, even though in his posthumously
published writings he claimed to repudiate the phenomenological
standpoint.
Who was Edmund Husserl, and what did he mean by ‘phenom-
enology’? He was born in 1859 in Moravia (now part of the Czech
Republic, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He
studied mathematics and philosophy in Berlin, Vienna and Halle,
and then taught philosophy at Halle, Göttingen and Freiburg, until
his retirement in 1929. His greatest philosophical achievement in
these years was to found the phenomenological movement, one of
the central strands of twentieth-century philosophy. Phenomenology
claimed to offer a new beginning in western philosophy, though one
that incorporated all that was best in earlier traditions, especially the
intellectual revolutions carried out by Descartes and by Kant. Like
all living schools of thought, it developed over time, but some ele-
ments in phenomenology remained constant through these changes.
One is the emphasis on human subjectivity. Knowledge and aware-
ness of the world are always someone’s knowledge and awareness, as
both Descartes and Kant had reminded us. Descartes had argued
that all sound conceptions of the world must be grounded in our

5
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

knowledge of our own existence as thinking beings, or subjects (the

Cartesian cogito: ‘I think, therefore I am’). Kant had stressed simi-
larly that the ‘I think’ must accompany all our representations – that
a representation of things must be a representation to someone.
Husserl saw the function of phenomenology as that of clarifying
the essences of the concepts used in the various forms of our aware-
ness of the world about us, including the natural sciences. In his ori-
ginal formulation of phenomenology, he describes both science, and
pre-scientific common sense, as part of what he called the ‘natural
attitude’: we naturally take for granted the objective existence of the
things of which we are aware, and seek to know more about them.
But if we are to pursue such scientific investigations fruitfully, we
need to understand what exactly it is that we are seeking to investi-
gate: what do we mean by our talk, in psychology for example, of
‘consciousness’ or ‘perception’ or, in physics, by our conceptions of
‘matter’? To discover that, Husserl argued, we need to set aside the
objectivist assumptions of the natural attitude, and concentrate on
our own subjective consciousness of how the things referred to appear
to us (hence ‘phenomenology’, from the Greek word ‘phenomena’,
meaning ‘appearances’). We must get back ‘to the things themselves’,
forgetting any scientific or other theories about the things in question,
and sticking to describing our concrete human experience of them, on
which any such theories must, after all, be based. This ranking of con-
crete experience as more important than abstract theorizing makes
phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty says, part of ‘the general effort of
modern thought’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: xxiv).
This emphasis on subjectivity might suggest that phenomenology
was simply a form of introspective psychology, retreating from the
objective world into our ‘inner selves’. But that is not how Husserl and
his followers saw subjectivity. The ‘subjective’ is not a separate inner
world, but is necessarily related to the world we are conscious of. To
make this point, Husserl took over a concept from the nineteenth-
century Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano (1837–1917): the
concept of the ‘intentionality’ of consciousness. Brentano had found
this term in the writings of mediaeval logicians, and had thought it
neatly expressed what distinguished the ‘psychic’ (mental) from the
‘physical’. To say that consciousness is ‘intentional’ is to say that it is
always directed towards or refers to some object: this can be expressed
in the slogan ‘consciousness is always consciousness of something’.
For example, thinking is always thinking about or of someone or

6
 PHENOMENOLOGY

something; being afraid is always being afraid of something; hoping

is always hoping for something. It is impossible just to think without
thinking about an object, or to be afraid without being afraid of
something, and so on.
The object that we are conscious of can be called the ‘intentional’
object. There are several interesting things to be said about the inten-
tional objects of consciousness. First, something can be an inten-
tional object without actually existing, and we can say that something
is an intentional object without knowing whether it exists or not.
For instance, we can be afraid of something which doesn’t really exist,
as in a child’s fear of the bogey-man. And to say that some people
are afraid of ghosts implies nothing about whether ghosts really
exist or not. This means that to say that something is the inten-
tional object of our consciousness is not the same as saying that it
causes our consciousness of it, since only things which really exist can
be causes. Thus, the relation of our consciousness to its intentional
objects is not a causal one, and the study of how intentional objects
appear to consciousness (phenomenology) is not the same as the
study of the causes of our consciousness of objects (empirical psy-
chology or physiology).
Secondly, we are conscious of an intentional object under some
particular description and not under others. For instance, I might be
thinking about Tony Blair without knowing that he is the current
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If someone asked me
whether I was thinking about the British Prime Minister, I should
then reply, ‘No, I’m thinking about Tony Blair’, and that would be a
true statement about my present thoughts, even though, looked at
from the outside, to think about Tony Blair in 2005 is to think about
the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. So we can say
what I am thinking about without reference to what is in fact the
case. In this sense, the phenomenological study of how things appear
to our consciousness is distinct from the study of how things are
‘objectively’, in the outside world, and can be carried on independ-
ently of any such objective study.
Thirdly, the different forms of our consciousness obviously relate
to their intentional objects in different ways. To believe in ghosts
and to be afraid of ghosts, for instance, have the same intentional
object, but they relate to that intentional object differently. A belief
in ghosts, as such, is simply the acceptance of a certain proposition
(‘There are such things as ghosts’). A fear of ghosts, on the other

7
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

hand, necessarily involves certain kinds of behaviour – shivers down

the spine in places which are believed to be haunted, avoidance of
such places, and so on. A love of ghosts would also involve behav-
iour and responses to the experience of ghosts, but behaviour and
responses which are of a different kind from those involved in fear.
In some individuals’ experience, belief in ghosts and fear of ghosts
may be inextricably entangled, but it does not follow that belief and
fear are conceptually indistinguishable. An important part of phe-
nomenology, as the study of how things appear to consciousness, is
thus the study of the different ways in which the same things appear
to different modes of consciousness, such as thought, perception,
fear, love, imagination, and so on. To put it another way, we need to
understand, not only what ghosts are or what we mean by ‘ghosts’,
but also what we mean by ‘thinking’, ‘perceiving’, ‘imagining’,
‘loving’, and how the essence of one of these modes of conscious-
ness differs from that of the others. Indeed, it might be argued that
study of the different modes of consciousness of objects and their
essential differences must come before study of the essences of what
we are conscious of, and much of phenomenological literature is in
fact concerned more with the essences of different modes of con-
sciousness than with those of the different objects of consciousness.
(Merleau-Ponty’s own studies of the phenomenology of perception
are a case in point.)
A phenomenology based on the acceptance of the intentionality of
consciousness is thus different from an empirical introspective psy-
chology in a number of important ways. First of all, it is not empiri-
cal. It is not concerned with what the world is objectively like, which
would need empirical data provided by observation and experiment,
but with what the objects that we believe ourselves to experience in the
world mean to us, or with what our belief in them means. We can
establish that without the need for empirical data about the outside
world (and so a priori), just by reflecting on our own experience.
Secondly, it is not introspective. Consciousness, if it is intentional,
cannot be studied separately from its objects, which are outside us
(even, paradoxically, if they don’t exist!). One way in which Husserl
differed from Brentano was that Brentano thought of intentional
objects as existing ‘in’ consciousness, whereas Husserl saw that that
could not be correct, since it is contrary to what ‘intentionality’
means. Someone who believes in ghosts does not just believe that the
idea of ghosts exists (something which could be accepted by the most

8
 PHENOMENOLOGY

dedicated sceptic about the supernatural), but that actual ghosts exist
‘out there’, waiting to be encountered on dark nights. What the sceptic
doubts, similarly, is that there are such actual ghosts. So to study our
consciousness of ghosts (or anything else) is not to look inside our
minds to study our ideas of ghosts, but to study what both the believer
and the sceptic mean by ‘ghosts’, what part that concept plays in our
shared human experience, as a potential inhabitant of the world
outside our minds.
Thirdly, phenomenology is not (scientific) psychology, both
because, as has just been said, it is not reliant on empirical data, and
also because it is descriptive rather than explanatory. Scientific psyc-
hology (like all sciences) does not only seek to establish the facts about
its particular domain, but to give a causal explanation of how those
facts come to be so: what causes what to happen. For instance, a psy-
chological study of perception would have to try to explain how it
comes about that we see things: light reflected from the object seen
impinges on our retinas, which in turn causes certain responses in the
optic nerve, and so on. But phenomenology is not concerned with
such explanations, only with describing what is essential to our per-
ception of such objects – what it means to us to ‘perceive’ such an
object. The answer to such questions certainly has a bearing on empir-
ical psychology (and on other relevant sciences), since it helps in
trying to give a scientific explanation of, say, perception to have a clear
idea of what it is exactly that one is trying to explain. And Merleau-
Ponty thought, as we shall see, that in a sense a knowledge of empir-
ical scientific findings could be relevant to phenomenology. A reading
of the psychological literature might suggest, for example, that some
of the explanations offered were unsatisfactory, not because they were
refuted by empirical observations, but because they were based on
confused philosophical assumptions. This would then give us a motive
to try to undermine these assumptions, and so clarify the concepts
used in the explanation, by means of phenomenological analysis. But
this, of course, still makes phenomenology a distinct activity from any
empirical science.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION

We can now understand better a central feature of phenomenological

method which was briefly mentioned earlier. To pursue phenome-
nology as a distinct activity, we need to separate the consideration of

9
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

‘phenomena’, as things which appear to us subjectively, from con-

sidering them as things actually existing in the objective world and
studied by empirical science. The way to do this, according to Husserl
in his early thought, is what he calls the ‘phenomenological reduc-
tion’, which he compares in some respects to Descartes’s method of
doubt. Descartes had tried to arrive at absolutely certain foundations
for knowledge by doubting any beliefs that it was possible to doubt,
which included, as he saw it, even our basic confidence in the exist-
ence of a world outside our own thoughts. The hope was that even-
tually he would come to at least one belief that it was completely
impossible to doubt, and this would then provide the basis for cer-
tainty he was looking for. That foundation was found, in Descartes’s
eyes, in the existence of our own thoughts, and in our own existence
as thinking beings. The ‘doubt’, of course, was a kind of pretence (or,
to put it in more flattering terms, it was ‘methodological’): Descartes
never really doubted that the outside world existed, he just treated the
existence of the world as if it were doubtful, for the purposes of his
method.
In somewhat the same way, though for different purposes, Husserl
tried to separate consideration of our experience of objects, just as
an experience, from consideration of all questions to do with their
actual existence. He proposed that we should, as it were, ‘put in
brackets’ what he called our ‘natural attitude’. The ‘natural attitude’
is the one we adopt most of the time when we are not engaged in phe-
nomenology: it is the attitude both of ordinary common sense and,
at a more sophisticated level, of science. We take for granted the exist-
ence of the objects we think about and deal with practically, and try
to understand how one such object relates to others. We must do this
if we are to live at all. But in the phenomenological reduction, we
‘bracket’ these assumptions, because as phenomenologists we are not
concerned with the demands of practical living but with a more
detached attempt at a purely theoretical understanding of what we
mean by certain concepts. Husserl often uses as an alternative to
‘bracketing’ the Greek word epoche (meaning literally ‘holding
back’): we as it were step back in the reduction from our everyday
practical involvement with the world in order to study phenom-
ena just as phenomena, without regard to their actual existence.
Having done this, we can more effectively consider the ‘essences’, the
distinctive meaning of each concept, without the distraction of ques-
tions concerning the existence of things corresponding to that

10
 PHENOMENOLOGY

concept. Thus, phenomenology is a ‘transcendental’ study, one which

investigates thoughts just as thoughts, without reference to the
objects that these thoughts are about.
There are, however, serious doubts about the validity of this notion
of transcendental phenomenology. It seems to be inconsistent with
the implications of the very idea of the intentionality of conscious-
ness which Husserl himself had made so central to phenomenology,
and to be in serious danger of sliding into philosophical idealism, the
view that only thoughts exist, and that what we call the objective
world is just a kind of construction out of thoughts. The idea of
intentionality implies, as we have seen, that consciousness cannot be
considered separately from its intentional objects – that we cannot,
for instance, think without thinking about something, something
which is not part of our consciousness. The thing we think about on
any particular occasion need not actually exist, but it does not follow
that we could investigate our thoughts about that thing in isolation
from all considerations of its existence. To say that it is an intentional
object is to say that it could exist, and that means independently of
our minds. We cannot consider our consciousness, therefore, without
thinking of the relation of that consciousness to a world independent
of it, so that complete ‘bracketing’ is impossible. We ourselves, as
conscious subjects of experience, cannot think of ourselves in isola-
tion from a world to which our experiences refer – even our imagi-
nary experiences presuppose a world in which the imaginary objects
could feature. We are not ‘transcendental subjects’, as Husserl
argued, pure subjects of thought who do not exist at any particular
time or place, but concrete human beings, living in a particular time
and place, and finding meaning in objects by virtue of our actual
dealings with them in that time and place.
One of Husserl’s greatest students was Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976). Heidegger says in his work Being and Time (Heidegger
1962) that what he initially found puzzling about phenomenology
was that it was supposed to be neither logic nor psychology. That is,
it neither studied the a priori laws of logic, which hold whether or
not anyone thinks of them, nor the empirical facts about what goes
on in real human beings when they think. It is supposed to be a study
which combines elements from both logic and psychology: it is
about consciousness, but not that of any particular person, just con-
sciousness as such. After meeting Husserl in 1916, Heidegger says,
his puzzlement decreased, though only slowly. He came to think that

11
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

phenomenology was not best seen as a metaphysical theory, like ide-

alism, about what exists or does not exist, but a certain way of think-
ing. In Being and Time, he describes phenomenology as primarily a
‘methodological conception’ (Heidegger 1962: 50), a way of inquir-
ing into objects, not something to be defined in terms of the kind of
objects investigated.
Heidegger also had his own definition of ‘phenomenology’, based
on what he claimed to be the meaning of the Greek words from
which the term is derived (phainomenon and logos). This definition
is rather tortuously expressed as ‘letting that which shows itself be
seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’
(Heidegger 1962: 58). More simply expressed, it is a return, in
Husserl’s slogan, ‘to the things themselves’, the effort to think of the
world of our experience without preconceptions – to let the world,
or Being, speak for itself. (Heidegger’s translators always use a
capital ‘B’ when referring to ‘Being’ in this sense.) ‘Ontology’ is the
traditional philosophical term for the study of Being as Being, of
what it means for anything to be. Heidegger is fundamentally con-
cerned in his philosophy with ontology in this sense, but in Being and
Time he says that ‘the question of the meaning of Being’ must be
treated phenomenologically (Heidegger 1962: 50).
To treat the meaning of Being phenomenologically is to start from
our own experience of Being: but that does not mean to look inside
our own minds at our inner experiences, nor to separate (as Husserl
tended to do in his early thinking) our consciousness from its objects.
Our own Being, Heidegger argued (and in this he was followed by
Merleau-Ponty), is Being-in-the-world. (The German term is a single
word, Inderweltsein: this expresses the unity of the concept, which we
have to express in English by the hyphens.) We do not exist apart from
the world we experience, but are part of it. We are, however, a pecu-
liar part of the world, by virtue of the fact that we are conscious of it.
This human mode of Being Heidegger called Dasein (the German
word for ‘existence’, which literally means ‘being there’). We experi-
ence the world, in other words, not as detached subjects or pure
reason, but as actual human beings who exist at a particular time and
place, and who interact with their surrounding world from that posi-
tion in space and time. Phenomenology, therefore, must be, not the
analysis of some detached pure consciousness, but ‘the analytic of
Dasein’, as Heidegger called it: the analysis of how things appear to
us in the course of our ordinary human interactions with the world.

12
 PHENOMENOLOGY

In the works which he wrote in the last years of his life, Husserl
seems to have recognized the force of Heidegger’s criticisms of his
early ‘transcendental’ phenomenology, and to have developed a
version of phenomenology which, while retaining as much as possi-
ble of his earlier thought, attempted to take account of these objec-
tions. Central to this later version is the idea of the Lebenswelt, or
‘life-world’: the starting-point of phenomenology is no longer the
act of ‘stepping-back’ from our ordinary involvement with the
world. Instead, we have to accept that, before all theorizing, we are
already involved in a world, and that the test of all our theoretical
opinions is to be found in that involvement with a world. ‘Is it not in
the end’, Husserl asks, ‘our human being, and the life of conscious-
ness belonging to it, . . . which is the place where all problems of
living inner being and external exhibition are to be decided?’
(Husserl 1970: 114). Science and philosophy are human activities
which arise within this life-world, and so are secondary to it. If we
are to return to basics, then, the presuppositions which we have to
set aside are those derived from scientific and philosophical theoriz-
ing. The crisis which Husserl came to see as affecting western civi-
lization as a whole arose, in his view, as soon as the Greeks
misguidedly saw the idea of ‘objective truth’, as sought in the sci-
ences, as required in all knowledge worthy of the name. Rather,
Husserl came to think, we should see science and its values as deriv-
ing what force they had from their part in a wider human engage-
ment with the world. The task of phenomenology was now to get
back to that underlying foundation of ordinary human experience
which is the source of science and all other theoretical activities.
Husserl still speaks of an epoche, but now it is a holding back from
all theoretical preconceptions, which will make possible ‘a complete
personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious
conversion’ (Husserl 1970: 137).

WHAT MERLEAU-PONTY MEANS BY ‘PHENOMENOLOGY’

Merleau-Ponty, as was said earlier, was particularly taken by this later,

more Heideggerian, form of phenomenology. Like Heidegger, he saw
phenomenology as ‘a manner or style of thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty
2002: viii) rather than a system of philosophy. Furthermore, this
manner or style of thinking had been practised, he thought, before
Husserl made it explicit as a method for doing philosophy: it can be

13
 MERLEAU-PONTY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

found, he said, in such thinkers as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx,

Nietzsche and Freud. All of these philosophers had been suspicious
of the western tradition in philosophy, which originated with the
Greeks, especially Plato. According to this tradition, the highest
human attribute was pure, impersonal reason. We were at our most
human when we set aside our merely individual and local perspectives
on the world, infected as they are by our emotional and practical
needs, and ascend to a more detached, or ‘objective’, view of things.
That is, we needed to give an account of things, not as they appear to
us from where we happen to be, but as they really are in themselves:
the kind of account which would be given by a being who did not have
any particular position in space or time (this is therefore what the
modern American philosopher Thomas Nagel calls ‘The View from
Nowhere’).
This ‘objectivist’ view runs through most of traditional western
philosophy, and gave rise eventually to the acceptance in modern
western culture of the mathematical natural sciences as providing the
most reliable account of what reality is fundamentally like. For it has
been recognized since Plato that mathematical propositions are the
clearest example of truths of reason: propositions which are imper-
sonally and timelessly true. ‘2
2  4’, to take the simplest example
imaginable of a mathematical proposition, is not true only for me or
only for you, not true only in 2005 or only in Ancient Greece, but is
simply true, whoever utters it and whenever it is uttered. To the extent
that empirical sciences like physics and chemistry (and biology,
considered as a derivative of physics and chemistry) can express their
discoveries in the language of mathematics – as equations, propor-
tions, ratios and so on – they too acquire the impersonality and time-
lessness of mathematics. Newton’s law of gravitation, for example,
which expresses the attraction between two bodies in terms of the
mathematical relations of their masses and of the distance between
them, is, if true, timelessly and impersonally so. Hence Galileo
expressed the essence of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries when he said that the book of nature was
written in the language of geometry, and could be understood only
by those who had mastered that language.
When applied to such things as planetary motion, or the workings
of machines, or the effect of chemicals on the functioning of animal
bodies, this approach has proved incredibly fruitful. But does it
follow that this is the only sensible way to understand everything we

14
 PHENOMENOLOGY

want to understand? When we want to understand human behaviour,

for instance, must we adopt a similarly impersonal attitude? Must we
see human actions as like the motions of machines, to be explained,
like them, in terms of physico-chemical laws? Or does the study of
human history or society, or of our experience of poetry or art, or of
personal relationships, have to be treated as a branch of physics
before it can truly be regarded as respectable? Some philosophers,
and many scientists, have thought so. The philosophers known as
‘eliminative materialists’, for example, want to replace our ordinary
understanding of human behaviour in terms of feelings, motives,
reasons and purposes, which they dismiss as mere ‘folk psychology’,
by a ‘completed neuroscience’. Suppose, for instance, that someone
enrols for a course in conversational Italian. In ordinary, non-
scientific, thinking we might understand this in terms of her reasons
for doing so – maybe she wants to get more out of her forthcoming
holiday in Italy. But this, according to an eliminative materialist, is a
primitive and unsatisfactory way of making sense of her behaviour –
rather like the mediaeval way of understanding why the flames of a
fire move upwards while a lump of soil falls to the ground: in terms
of the natural striving of each type of matter, up or down respec-
tively. Science, for these philosophers, offers us a better way of under-
standing, both in the case of the movement of flames and in that of
human behaviour. In the latter case, a fuller knowledge of the work-
ings of the brain and nervous system would, they claim, enable us to
give a properly based explanation of, say, this person’s enrolment in
the Italian class.
This idea that scientific explanations are always to be preferred to
non-scientific is not confined to philosophers such as the eliminative
materialists, but is widespread in our culture, because of the enor-
mous prestige which especially the natural sciences enjoy in the
modern world. A description of a situation in ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’
terms is regarded as more respectable, as coming closer to represent-
ing the reality of the situation, than one which uses purely qualitative
language. For instance, talking of wavelengths of light is thought to
be better than talking of colours, or talking of brain-processes as
better than talking of thoughts or feelings. Human beings come to be
seen as just one more kind of object in the world, as nothing but
members of a particular animal species or type of biological system,
the workings of which have in turn to be explained in terms of
physico-chemical processes.

15