MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1907-1961)
1930-35 High School Teacher
1935-39 Teacher Training College (met Sartre there)
1942 The Structure of Behavior
1943 The Phenomenology of Perception
1947 Humanism and Terror
1950 Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne
1952 Elected to the College of France. Assumed the Chair of Henri Begson
1955 Adventures of the Dialectic
1961 Died of a heart attack.
Closest connection with Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, whose basic theory is the doctrine of intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something; consciousness always takes an object. There is no such thing as pure consciousness with innate ideas separate from the world. Internal (i.e., interdependent) relations (not external) between consciousness and its objects.
Act IntentionalityCspecific and conscious acts. Primary focus of Husserl=s philosophy
vs.
Primordial or Operative IntentionalityCprereflective field of possible objects of consciousnessCalready Amapped out@ as it were. Lighthouse analogy. Grandma example. Swear words experiment.
There is a logos to our phenomena, hence phenomenology is possibleCphenomena + logos.
AOut of this [phenomenological] investigation, he averred, a >single drama= must gradually unfold itself, a pattern or >logos= reflective not of some >pure being= in a >realm apart,= but, rather, of the universal >sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people=s intersect and engage each other like gears@ (G&S, p. 567).
The influence of later Husserl (1929), when he started speaking of the Life-world (Lebenswelt). Most likely influenced by Heidegger=s Being-in-the-World. Therefore, a Alife-world@ or Aexistentialist@ phenomenology. This was Husserl=s own reaction against his earlier Aintellectualism@ and ACartesianism@ (wrote Cartesian Meditations also in 1929). Husserl=s phenomenological reductions:
1. The epochéC@bracketing@ of the Anatural attitude@ of common sense, science, and all objectifying thinking.
2. The intuition of essences (Wesenschau), a conscious apprehension of pure essences, the main goal of Husserl=s phenomenology.
3. A third reduction to the transcendental ego. Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty say that there is no such ego. Heidegger=s Dasein, Sartre=s pour-soi, and Merleau-Ponty=s Abody ego@ are the substitutes.
Merleau-Ponty: AI am my body.@ The AIncarnate Mind.@ Mind and body are coextensive, or sometimes the mind extends beyond the physical body (phantom limb phenomenon).
Obvious influence of Marcel. We have a living body that never functions separately from the mind of the world. Cartesianism=s back is completely broken.
Operative Intentionality: Athe natural and ante-predicative unity of the world and of our life.@ (Misprint in G&S, p. 568left.) AThe world is not what I think, but what I live through.@
Principal differences with Sartre:
1. Relational freedom not radical freedom meaning-giving (Sinngeburn) of world meets meaning-giving subject. Sartre has only the latter.
2. ACondemned to meaning@ vs. Acondemned to freedom.@
3. Much less alienation and despair.
4. Intersubjectivity rather than intrasubjectivity.
MERLEAU-PONTY'S "HEGEL'S EXISTENTAILISM"
What strikes you as odd about the title? Isn't it an oxymoron? Didn't SK fight Hegel? Passage on "expanded" reason - "synthetic" (vs. analytic) "broad" (vs. strict) "dynamic" (vs. static) "aesthetic"
64: SK fought the late Hegel, not the early "Existentialist" Hegel.
The late Hegel "treated history as the visible development of a logical system, . . . who subordinated the individual experience of life to the life appropriate to ideas. . . ." The late Hegel committed one of M-P's greatest sins: viz., "intellectualism" or idealism. This is the view that the ideas of the mind constitute all things or at least all meaning.
"The last Hegel has understood everything except his own historical situation... (quote more)" Marx's Hegel was also "existentialist" until the Marxist-Leninists made a system out of it. Both Marx and SK understood the individual's situation in the world, while the late Hegel pretended ignorance about it.
65: The early Hegel of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Here there is no preestablished logic to history, situation is acknowledged, also the "tragedy" of history. The early Hegel had rejected Kant's own intellectualism.
65: The early Hegel "reveals the immanent logic of human experience in all of its sectors." Each era has its "logic" (logos), not one big universal logos.
65: "Hegel's thought is existentialist in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its won clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsiblity and which tries to understand itself."
65 (bottom): Hegel's concept of truth looks like SK's--a subjective certainty held fast to make a momentary and dialectical objective "truth." Humans in another historical period start this process again.
66: Very Sartrean passages. Quote. Bottom: the pour-soi-en-soi --existence totally aware of itself is impossible. Conscious of life is consciousness of death. Sartrean-Hegelian - consciousness is nothingness - absence. There's no more lucidity than consciousness of a lack (an empty billfold after being robbed.)
67(top): consciousness and death in the early Hegel--very existentialist: "To be aware of death and to think or reason are one and the same thing, since one thinks only by disregarding what is characteristic of life and thus by conceiving death." Whereas the young existentialist Hegel prefers to speak of death, the late Hegel speaks only of an abstract negativity.
Our only salvation is that we exist "instead of merely living." This means the idea of a healthy human is a myth (became a great Nazi myth), for, according to the early Hegel, the human "is the sick animal." Just like SK's "sickness unto death." Even the late Hegel speaks of the "unhappy consciousness," which will get more intense as Spirit reaches its final resolution.
68(top): Sartrean-Hegelian language again: "each consciousness seeks the death of the other. . ." Mitsein is the basis for conflict? Hegel is more like Heid and Jaspers here.
68: Critique of Sartre: freedom only in relation "By myself I cannot be free.... (more)" Dialectic of Master-Slave. It's really the Master who's weak. Example of Epictetus. Only the slave knows the real truth of Mitsein; the Master only seeks to exist totally by himself.
If Sartre is right about "Hell is other people," then we would have all been dead long ago. M-P won't go as far as Marcel--love is proof of intersubjectivity--but he definitely believes in it.
69: The slave has mastery "at the expense of nature, not of other people." de Beauvoir - implications for feminism! "Single act in which consciousness is made whole...."? pour-soi-en-soi? The master is weak in his strength, but the slave is strong in her weakness. Hegel's dialectic of Master and Slave. The Master's greatest failing is seeing this relationship dualistically rather than dialectically. The slave "is better acquainted with man's vital core [Mitsein?]. . ." He has experienced total anxiety, guilt, fear of death, and has risked all.
NB: When Hegel begins speaking about resolution, he stops being an existentialist. Heid., e.g., preserves the awareness of death, but Hegel "transmutes" it. It's aufgehoben - taken up into a higher synthesis.
Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit has made possible a philosophy of the Church or the Communist Party. At this point of course he ceases being an existentialist.
Critique of Heidegger: What he lacks (de Beauvoir agrees): "affirmation of the individual" and the "struggle of consciousness," the "opposition of freedoms.
Weakness in French existentialism (Sartre and de Beauvoir): death is not a focus for them. Two other problems with Sartre: not enough Mitsein and inadequate notion of freedom--fails to see that real freedom is in engagement and social relations. We will see that de Beauvoir will part with Sartre on the last point.
70: M-P's "more complete definition" of existentialism.