Gurwitsch’s Critique of Merleau-Ponty[1]
Lester Embree
Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty were introduced in 1933 and met afterwards in
I.
For Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty is an
existentialist, but existentialism has affinities with phenomenology.
Both movements are opposed to what Gurwitsch calls “Cartesianism.” What this is
and why it is opposed can be seen best by beginning from Gurwitsch’s objection
to Colin Smith’s translation of Merleau-Ponty’s reflection as
“introspection.” This translation Gurwitsch considers “the misunderstanding
par excellence, because it gives rise to the impression that phenomenological
statements are first-person reports on personal experiences, as though
phenomenology were concerned with a domain of interiority” (PR 421). For
Gurwitsch, phenomenological statements can be said to be objective and
eidetic, but the key objection here concerns interiority, for interiority is
opposed to and thus implies exteriority and this means a dualism of directly
encountered contents inside the mind and “real things” outside the mind to
which we have no direct access. In a passage reflecting the peculiarly noematic
emphasis of Gurwitsch’s phenomenology, we are told that “Phenomenology does
not deal with events occurring in a sphere of interiority; on the contrary, it
concerns itself with things, objects, situations as they present themselves,
are meant and intended, taken in full concreteness with all the components of
sense, signification, and significance which they exhibit as theirs” (PR 421).
The point is that for phenomenology and existentialism reality is directly
accessible. The people, the chairs and tables, the countryside and the sky we see
are not subjective contents within our minds but the real things themselves.
How do existentialism and
phenomenology differ? While there may be some dissatisfaction with the
historiographic category of existentialism today as well as with the subsumption
of Merleau-Ponty under it, we should remember that thirty years ago there was
none.[5] For Gurwitsch, existentialism denies
that there can be a detached observer beyond or above the world and instead
contends that cognitive and philosophical activities are performed by men who
find themselves thrown into concrete situations of concern to them. Rather
than an expression of emotionalism, anxiety and despair, as it was attacked
for being in the years after World War II, existentialism represents, according
to Gurwitsch, “a reflection on the conditions of philosophical and, generally,
cognitive endeavors” (PR 418). Yet it considers man in the full concreteness of
his existence and hence is not exclusively or at least chiefly concerned with
mental or conscious life, intellectual functions, and what is accomplished in
them (PTS 8), which Gurwitsch of course was. Let us return at the end of this
exposition to how Gurwitsch more precisely opposed existentialism from the
standpoint of constitutive phenomenology. In the meantime, let us consider
other and less general points of interpretation, agreement, and disagreement.
II.
Perception is central for both thinkers. As late
as 1959 Gurwitsch stated that “Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception coincides,
though broadly, with the present one; this agreement consists more in the descriptive
formulation of the phenomenal state of affairs than in the theoretical
interpretation” (SPP 349, cf. PR 419). In these ambivalent terms we can
understand the extensive convergence with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of le
prejuge du monde objectif, supporting it with reference to his own earlier
account of how psychology has been shaped historically by physics (SPP 99 f.,
cf. Chs. 2 & 1). In his own preferred terminology, which I shall emphasize
here, he distinguishes between “the perceptual world,” on the one hand, and the
intellectually constructed (and misunderstandable) “physical universe,” on the
other hand. In these terms, the prejuge “consists in taking for granted
and accepting as a matter of course the idea of the objective, exactly
determined, at least determinate universe” (PR 418). If one proceeds on the
assumption of this “universe” or monde objectif, then the formulation of
problems in psychology is affected and, since this has in fact been done, all
previous work on perception is vitiated. The idea of such a scientifically
determinate universe needs to be examined with respect to its origin,
justification, limits, and validity and this can be done only in relation to
the perceptual world (SPP 99 f., FC 163, PPR 442). After all, the physical
universe is not an always already pregiven datum as the perceptual world is,
but—at least for Gurwitsch—a construct. (Such a constructed entity, I might
insert, may be as ardently and habitually believed as any religious object and
indeed might also be taken analogously as more real than what we see.) The
physical universe is actually secondary in relation to the perceptual world and
not to be accepted as a matter of course.
If one ceases naively to assume the
unperceivable physical universe as primary, then both the empiricistic
and the intellectualistic approaches to perception are undermined. From the
empiricistic standpoint, perception is the causal result of physiological
processes provoked by physical processes beyond the physiological body, all
processes and events being conceived of as they are interpreted and constructed
in physical science. Intellectualistic thinking is also related to the prejuge,
for it “sees” in perception an incipient science; here the notion of an
objective, scientifically determined universe is not considered as a cause
producing perception, but rather as a telos immanent in perception and
orienting it from within” (PR 418). In contrast to the physical universe, the
perceptual world is the world of “prescientific” and “preobjective”
perceptual experience, the immediately given world, the world with which we
have direct contact, the world within which we find ourselves at every moment
of our lives, the world in which we pursue our activities. It has “profoundly
human significance” and has its “indeterminations, uncertainties, and
ambiguities”; according to Gurwitsch interpreting Merleau-Ponty, it is what
Husserl called the life-world (PR 418). And access to this perceptual world is
through perception, the objects of perception are to be taken as given and
without reference to the ideal of scientific knowledge or the physical universe
(PPR 442), “modes of perceptual experience [being] modes of conduct in that world,
modes of dealing with its objects, modes of coming to quarter with arising
situations” (PR 418). More generally, Gurwitsch recommended translating
Merleau-Ponty’s etre au monde not, a la Heidegger, as “being in
the world” but as “being at the world” (PPR 443, PR 422).
Gurwitsch is quite clear that for him
perceptual consciousness is not thoroughly thematizing, explicit, or articulate
(PPR 443) and thus he can readily appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s description of
inner time as pre-thematic and prepositional and hence experienced as
continuously passing, without there being any synthesizing of phases which
were previously posited as distinct from one another;[6] the perceptual world and also our
embodied existence are, in addition, phenomena which are usually objects of
unthematic or marginal consciousness for Gurwitsch as well as for Merleau-Ponty
(FC 417, cf. 405 & 369 n. 146). With all his concern with how “themes”
stand out from fields of consciousness, one might expect Gurwitsch to have
commented on whether Merleau-Ponty concurred with this doctrine, with which
the Frenchman was acquainted since before 1933, but all one can find is
approval of the contention that the figure/ground structure is essential to
perception (FC 112 & 321). Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty did, however, share
a concern with integrating gestalt-theoretical and phenomenological approaches
and results. I once asked Gurwitsch if he had taught Merleau-Ponty about these
two tendencies. He replied that Merleau-Ponty was already familiar with them
when they met, but that he had taught him to appreciate what could be learned
from Goldstein and had been taught about Pradines in return. With respect to
Goldstein, we do find Gurwitsch citing Merleau-Ponty on “the impairment of the
unformulated, matter-of-course familiarity with the perceptual world under
pathological conditions, especially in cases traditionally classified as
‘psychological blindness’” (FC 382 n. 6), having already commented that “the
case in question has been very thoroughly discussed by Merleau-Ponty ..., but
under the perspective of a general phenomenological orientation different, in
some respects, from that in which we have here engaged ourselves” (FC 277 n.
135). Just what the differences more precisely are in this connection is
difficult to determine.[7]
With respect to the foregoing, we may
observe that Gurwitsch considers phenomenology to be of course descriptive and
thus contrasts it with psychology, which he considers explanatory. He is aware
that Merleau-Ponty challenges the explanatory style in psychology (SPP 100),
but he did not, thus accepting psychology as a natural science (FC 172).
Nevertheless, for him “consciousness” is essentially ambiguous and both
naturalistic and phenomenological points of view upon it are possible.[8] Despite this difference, Gurwitsch discusses with
approval how, for Merleau-Ponty, a consistently descriptive orientation in
psychology leads to a transcendental attitude (although, as we shall see later,
this approval was not complete, given the limitations placed on the
transcendental by the younger man). Even if we start from the physical universe
and consider the perceptual world and its contents effects of causes in that
universe, we must still consider the perceptual world as it appears to consciousness.
Conversely, if we begin from the perceptual world, we quickly encounter the
problem of access to the physical universe (FC 171).
III.
If we now turn from general to
specific issues, we find that both philosophers opposed the doctrine of the perceptual
object whereby its organization is due to a geometral, i.e., a law,
formula, or idea of the intellect which is only accessible to the intellect and
which coordinates and unifies sensory aspects of the object (FC 296, cf. 299;
Gurwitsch found the Smith translation of geometral as “flat projection”
particularly objectionable (PR 420)). If the organization is not due to an idea
“above,” as it were, the sensuous qualities, how is organization to be
accounted for? Repeatedly, Gurwitsch quotes the passage from Phénoménologie
de la perception where the object is called “an organism of colors, smells,
sounds, and tactile appearances which symbolize, modify, and accord with each
other,”[9] commenting in one of his last
articles that, “In other words, the thing as the system of its attributes and
properties, a system exhibiting the organizational form of Gestalt-coherence,
is ‘present’ in each of its members, i.e., in every property which can thus
perform its function of providing an entry into that very system.”[10] Another name for this “organizational form” would seem
to be what Merleau-Ponty calls “a real logic” (FC 295, cf. PPR 444). As for how
a quality or attribute of an object has a role in such an intrinsically
organized object qua system of properties, we can again take a passage
where Gurwitsch quotes and comments on Merleau-Ponty.
“A color is never merely a color, but
the color of a certain object, and the blue of a carpet would never be the same
blue were it not a wooly blue.”[11] Wooly things have a specifically
characteristic way of being blue which is physiognomically different from the
ways in which other things, e.g., inks, human eyes, the sky on a cloudless day,
etc. are blue. This is to say, all attributes of a thing contribute to
determining and qualifying its chromatic property.[12]
The same would hold intersensorially,
so that, e.g., we “see” the rigidity and fragility of glass (FC 295).
If we turn from the perceptual object
to the perceptual process, the central point of agreement between our subjects
concerns what the younger man calls “the synthesis of transition.” This is
construed by Gurwitsch in Husserlian terms as a passive synthesis (SPP 155) and
he quotes with approval the following Merleau-Pontean description, which he
curiously classifies as “noetic.”
My experience
... is bound up with itself in such a way that I do not have different
perspective views linked to each other through the conception of an invariant.
…
I do not have one perspective, then
another, and between them a link brought about by the understanding, but each
perspective merges into the other and, insofar as it is still possible
to speak of a synthesis, we are concerned with a “synthesis of tradition.”[13]
The curiousness of the classification
of this description as noetic will appear presently.
Aron Gurwitsch was not, however, in
full agreement with Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception (translations in the
following are by Gurwitsch):
According to Merleau-Ponty, a
distinction and even an opposition must be established between the thing given
in “proper evidence” or “perceptive evidence” on the one hand and a series of
concordant perspectives, aspects, and appearances, on the other. “We do not
start from knowing the perspective aspects of the thing; it is not mediated by
our sense, our sensations, our perspectives. We have immediate access to it (nous
allons droitdelle) …” “...
Every attempt to define the thing.... as a synthesis of appearances,
substitutes for the thing itself in its original being, an imperfect reconstruction
of the thing by means of subjective fragments (lambeaux) ...” Discussing constancies of
perception, especially constancy of shape and size, Merleau-Ponty writes “When
I look at the furniture in my room in front of me, the table with its shape and
size is not for me a law or rule of display (deroulement) of phenomena,
an invariable relation: because I perceive the table with its definite size and
shape, I expect (presume), for every change in distance or orientation,
a correlative change in size and shape—and not the reverse. Upon the evidence
of the thing is founded the constancy of relations, rather than the thing being
reduced to constant relations.
This view of Merleau-Ponty seems to
us at variance with his theory as a whole, especially his tenet that the thing
is not to be considered as a “common significance,” a geometral, or an
invariant, apart from, and in some sense above, the appearances. If the
perceptual apprehension of a thing does not result from intellectual operations
upon data of sense-experience or even aspects, its relatedness to the perceived
thing is not bestowed upon a perceptual experience by supervenient mental
activities, but, on the contrary, is essentially and intrinsically inherent in
the perceptual experience. Such intrinsic relatedness purports that, though
every single perception is only a one-sided because adumbrational presentation
of the perceived thing, still the thing presents itself through every single
perception as a whole. More precisely, the thing presents itself as such and as
that whole as which it is meant and intended (in the mode of perceptual
apprehension) through the single perception under consideration.[14]
The reason Merleau-Ponty separated
the thing itself and its concordant appearances is, according to Gurwitsch,
that he failed to distinguish, at least in this connection, the noetic and
the noematic aspects of perception and hence did not pursue distinctly
noematic analyses for their own sake, which “investigations ultimately lead to
the disclosure of the noematic status of all objects, including perceivable
material things” (FC 301). If I understand this correctly, Gurwitsch takes
Merleau-Ponty to have described the object which is unreflectively or straightforwardly perceived, to have also
described the perceptual or noetic process reflectively, but not to
have distinctly reflected upon and described the perceptual noema, the
perceived object just and precisely as perceived, for if he had done so he
would have recognized that the entire object is present in each of its aspects
or appearances, the object which appears appearing, one may say, in the object
as it appears. Gurwitsch actually (and explicitly—hence the curiousness of the
earlier classification) objects that Merleau-Ponty does not investigate perception
noetico-noematically at all, but rather relates perception to the phenomenal
body, considered as the subject of perception (SPP 349 n. 52). This would
seem to be because he believed that for Merleau-Ponty “the organizational
structure ... originates in the embodied existence and thence is transferred
and communicated to perceived things” (FC 303, cf. PPR 444; this at least
makes calling the perceptual object an “organism” less metaphorical!).
Gurwitsch would no doubt have contended instead that the organization of the
perceptual object is autochthonous and thus no more transferred from the phenomenal
body than from sense-conferring consciousness. It might even be that for
Gurwitsch the body itself is a perceptual object, which raises logical problems
for Merleau-Ponty’s doctrine. In any event, we should now turn to the
Gurwitschean examination of Merleau-Ponty’s body theory.
IV.
If we recall the distinction between
the perceptual world and the physical universe discussed above, we can readily
grasp that the distinction between “the phenomenal body” and “the
biological organism” is subsumable under it (cf. FC 169) and indeed that any
granting of priority to the latter is part and parcel of Le préjugé du
monde. For Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, the “phenomenal body” has priority.
Gurwitsch characterizes it as “the body which I live, which I experience as
mine, which defines my situation within and my point of view upon the world,”
he also calls it “the somatic body” and even “the organismic body,” and he
suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the body as instrument, agent, and
even subject of perception invites a comparative study with pragmatism,
especially that of Dewey (PR 419). He traces the distinction back to Scheler,
finds it also in Kohler and Sartre (SPP 98 f.), and he also appears sympathetic
with the Frenchman’s suggestion that the phenomenal body rather than the body
as a physical system be the subject matter of biological science (FC 169 n.
26). In The Field of Consciousness he agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our
embodied existence has a perceptual organization: Thus a bodily posture
or gesture concerns, if not the entire body, at least a system of organs, these
organs conditioning and determining one another, and the body being polarized
toward a task in relation to which functions are assigned to the organs.[15]
This body as experienced by the
involved subject is, furthermore, an intersensorial object, the visual data
being implied by the tactual and vice versa, etc. “Embodied existence exhibits
throughout the organizational structure described above as Gestalt coherence.”
Awareness of this body is normally prethematic; in positive terms, there is “an
inarticulate and indistinct familiarity” with it, something which appears most
strikingly under pathological conditions where patients lose this familiarity
along with the normal disposal of their organs. (FC 301-02). Finally, where the
presentation of Merleau-Ponty on the body is concerned, this passage must be
quoted: “Bodily movements, postures, and gestures are not processes of the same
nature as physical or chemical processes (“processus en troisieme
personne”), nor can they be accounted for in terms of representations of
movements, postures, and gestures. The life of the organic body yields the
prototype of what Merleau-Ponty calls existence: projection into situations,
solicitations and responses to solicitations, orientations within a structured
and organized field, realization of intentions” (PPR 443).
Gurwitsch begins to disagree where
Merleau-Ponty claims that the unity and identity of the perceived thing are not
only correlative to those of the body but also that as correlate the perceived
thing is “accessible to inspection by the body” (FC 304, emphasis
added). What Gurwitsch strenuously objects to is the referring of perceivable
things and indeed the perceptual world to embodied existence rather than to
consciousness, observing that the phenomenal body itself can only be referred
to phenomenologically such as it appears in the awareness of it, and awareness
of consciousness which need not be explicitly positing or thematizing (and
prethematic, prepositional, or marginal consciousness is still consciousness).
The question of constitution for consciousness thus arises, for Gurwitsch, not
only for things, cultural objects, and ideal objects, but also for the
phenomenal body and embodied existence (FC 305, cf. PTS 11 n. 11). In contrast
with Merleau-Ponty, for whom the phenomenal body is understood as a genetivus
subjectivus, Gurwitsch follows Husserl in understanding this intentionality
“of” as a genetivus objectivus (PTS 104). In short, the phenomenal body
for Gurwitsch is not part of the ultimately transcendental intending but rather
among the mundane matters ultimately transcendentally intended to, albeit
something usually intended to in a prethematic or marginal fashion, even by
mundane consciousness.[16]
V.
We can now return to the more general
question of phenomenology vs. existentialism which was earlier left in abeyance.
According to Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty opposed constitutive phenomenology
because the idea of it seemed to him to “rest upon the conception of
consciousness as fully transparent, thoroughly explicit, and thematizing” (PPR
444, cf. 443). We have already seen indication enough that for Gurwitsch
“consciousness” broadly includes prethematic or marginal consciousness. One
might expect Gurwitsch to have asserted such things as theoretical attitude
(cf. PTS 177, etc.) and eidetic method (cf. FC 189 ff. & SPP 359 ff.)
against Merleau-Ponty, but he does not do so explicitly. Also he does not
contrast the transcendental and mundane statuses of consciousness.[17] What he instead does explicitly is
challenge the younger man on the acceptance of the perceptual world as such
and, correlatively, on the scope of transcendental inquiry.
In the first regard, we have
Gurwitsch writing this in a note.
Considering the essential contingency
of the perceptual world, we cannot persuade ourselves to endorse
Merleau-Ponty’s formulation: “There is an absolute certitude of the world in
general, but not of any particular thing.”[18]
…
At present we wish to stress that
both existential beliefs are affected by the phenomenological reduction ... .
(FC 226 n. 57)
The point is not whether doubt of the
world is motivated, which thus far it has not been, but only that it is
conceivable and that if one suspends acceptance of the world, one is the more
able to investigate reflectively the world as intended to (FC 164-68,
particularly the quotation of Gaston Berger in 167 n. 21). In Gurwitsch’s
phenomenology it would seem that phenomenological epoche especially
facilitates noematic analysis, a type of analysis we have already seen
him contend that Merleau-Ponty did not distinctly and thoroughly practice where
perception is concerned. In the second regard, we also saw earlier how, for
Gurwitsch, “Merleau-Ponty correctly formulates the program of transcendental
phenomenology as it may be developed if psychological reflection is radically
carried out” (FC 171). The passage continues, however, as follows:
Yet, according to him, the
transcendental problem concerns only the constitution of the objective world in
itself, the “true and exact world” ... on the basis of the pre-scientific and
pre-objective world as it appears in immediate perceptual experience, as both
preceding and necessary for any thematization and reflection ... . No
transcendental question is raised by Merleau-Ponty as to the constitution of
the pre-objective world. On the contrary, he accepts it in its absolute
factuality ... . If Merleau-Ponty has not developed a phenomenology of
perception in the full transcendental sense, it is because the existentialist
setting of his investigations prevents him from performing the phenomenological
reduction in a radical manner.
In sum, while Merleau-Ponty
recognized a transcendental problem where the constitution of the “physical
universe” is concerned and recognized that this constitution is accomplished
on the basis of the perceiving of the perceptual world (in this he and
Gurwitsch agreed), he did not recognize the problem of the constitution of that
very “perceptual world,” including, I take it, the phenomenal body. Gurwitsch
did. For him the constitution of the perceptual world, the perceptual object,
and the phenomenal body as well as the physical universe are all to be
investigated through noetico-noematic reflection in a transcendental attitude
upon the marginal as well as thematic consciousness of them. Everything
transcendent is transcendentally constituted, not merely the physical universe.
Van Breda once told me that
Merleau-Ponty said, presumably after reading Theorie du champ de la
conscience (1957), that Gurwitsch went “too far.” Gurwitsch’s position
seems to be that Merleau-Ponty did not go far enough!
Continuation . . .
Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty were
investigators of the matters themselves first and interpreters of texts at best
second. Responding to their examples, let me just begin to develop a central
issue between them, namely: the body, a bit beyond them. Generally I am in much
greater sympathy with Gurwitsch, although not with his all but exclusive focus
on intellection; I would give equal attention to axiology and praxiology as to
epistemology (which includes theory of science) within transcendental
phenomenology as well as to the correlative affective or pathic and endeavoring
or praxic ingredients within concrete life and its lived objects and
situations, thus attempting to redress an imbalance in the execution even Husserl
gave to his three-fold project.
Following the lead of Gurwitsch,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Kohler, Husserl, Scheler, etc., I accept that there is a
phenomenal body prior to the body of anatomy, physiology, etc.; with some of
them I also agree that it is usually the correlate of marginal awareness; and
with at least Gurwitsch that it is “irreducibly” mundane. What Gurwitsch should
have done, however, where the existentialist position as he presents it is
concerned, is (1) point out explicitly that such a practically and marginally
lived body can nevertheless be as such a theme for theoretical reflection, as
it indeed already was for the philosophical theorists Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.
(2) He should have pointed out that hence, rather than relate the two ways in
which the body can appear to a theory/practice distinction,[19] one should relate them instead to a distinction between the
natural-scientific and the human-scientific theoretical standpoints. (3)
Finally, he should have been clearer in his discussions of the body how the
body as a physical thing is also perceived even though used as a springboard
for the construction of the models chiefly of concern to the biological
theorist. To dilate a bit on the last point, with its value and use the body
might best be called the “lived body,” what might best be called the “soma”
might be seen as derived from it through neutralization of the pathic and
praxic theses in the living of it by an observer with scientific purposes and
then seen as having a gestalt organization of its own, and what might be called
“the biological organism” would be the construct erected in natural science on
the basis of the soma, while “the human body” names the model constructed in human
science. In sum, within the natural attitude, the “phenomenal body” discussed
by Merleau-Ponty and Gurwitsch can be considered in relation to theoretical as
well as practical life and, within the theoretical perspective,
human-scientifically as well as natural-scientifically. Much of the
existentialism of the lived body should be of value to the human sciences.
Already it is plain that I advocate
some sort of a distinction between body and mind (I am not sure that close
interpretation of Merleau-Ponty would not show that he did too, despite what
the “body people” say). Perhaps inattentive readers overlook how for Gurwitsch
there is, at least in the natural attitude (theoretical as well as practical),
a psychosomatic unity.[20] In the light of the matters themselves, it seems to me that
there are such unities, including brutes and human persons. Such unities have
gestalt organizations of which the psychic and somatic constituents are
themselves suborganizations. The distinctive difference of the psychic from the
somatic is intentiveness. After all, not all discriminable constituents of a Gegenstand
must have the same determinations, e.g., an apple has shape and color, but
must shape have hue or chromatic differences be tangible? The somatic per se
is not intentive. Within the natural attitude, then, an anatomist, for
example, would base his thought on a perceptual thematization of the
non-intentive but, among other things, phenomenally spatial and causal
constituents of the concrete person, while the humanistic (and even the
naturalistic) psychologist bases his thought on the intentive or psychic
constituents, some of which are intentive to the lived body (or the soma) of
the psyche thematized.
If by “psyche” we understand mind
considered in the natural attitude, i.e., mundane mind, does transcendental epoche
mean that the psychosomatic unity is broken up and that another and
transcendental concretum is disclosed? To be sure, this is no occasion for a
full discussion of such a question, but perhaps the formulation of a contrast
will help keep the transcendental alternative under consideration. In
naturalism, mind is regarded as secondary and relative to body in a causal manner
and, thus defined, naturalism does not preclude but only subordinates psychic
intentiveness. Could there be another position, however, which does not
preclude but only subordinates causation and makes body secondary and relative
to mind in an intentive manner? Such a mental constituent of a unitary
person would still always perceive or live from a standpoint naturalistically
determinable in terms of the locus and condition of the somatic organs within
the natural world as it appears (and also determinable humanistically in
historical, sociological, linguistic, geographic, economic, and other
human-scientific terms), but its component mental or intentive processes would
appear to flow in a temporality roughly parallel to but discriminable from the
spatiocausal temporality of the natural world (which founds, e.g., instrumental
value and means-ends relationships within the human world). Transcendental epoche
would then involve the generally corporeomental person or brute appearing
differently and the question could be raised of whether this different
appearance of unitary Gegenstaende is not one which, due to the account
of being it makes possible as well as its far greater articulation, reveals
what is truly fundamental.
On the matters at issue between
Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, more can be reflectively, theoretically, and even
transcendentally observed, analyzed, and eidetically described in the spirit of
their agreements than is dealt with in the letter of their texts.
[1] I
thank Alexandre Métraux for presenting an earlier version of this paper at the
session on Gurwitsch of the collegium phaenomenologicum in
[2] Most of the relevant material is included in notes to Lester Embree, “Merleau-Ponty’s Examination of Gestalt Psychology,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 10 (1980).
[3] In
Gurwitsch’s writings, “Merleau-Ponty” is in effect Phénoménologie de la
perception (Paris, Librarie Gallimard, 1945); from his review (cited below)
of Phenomenology of Perception (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1962) it is plain he had a low opinion of the translation of Colin Smith,
granting that it is very difficult to translate Merleau-Ponty’s “very personal
and highly complicated style, not to speak of remaining faithful to the
literary and artistic qualities of his writing which, in our opinion, do not
always enhance conceptual precision.” He also refers to La Structure du
comportement a few times and I know that he read Humanisme et Terreur. From
a letter to Schutz we know that he finished reading the Phenomenology for
the first time in August 1947. He refers to it in print first in 1949 (cf. Studies
in Phenomenology and Psychology,
[4] PPR 444,
FC 305, PR 419. From one letter to Schutz we know that he planned to rewrite a
segment excised from the first draft of FC to include “ganz explicite
ausein-andersetzungen mil Sartre und Merleau-Ponty”; this text, which will
appear as Marginal Consciousness, ed. Lester Embree, Ohio University
Press, forthcoming, was not, however, revised in that respect. Then again,
Gurwitsch was to speak on Merleau-Ponty at
[5] PR 417,
PPR 442, PTS 4; in his last book, namely: Leibniz, Philosophie des
Panlogismus, Walter de Gruyter,
[6] FC 416 n. 7, cf. FC 369 n. 146. This aspect of Gurwitsch’s position will be much clearer when Marginal Consciousness appears.
[7] The two other passages in Gurwitsch concerning Merleau-Ponty on Goldstein relate to the concrete/categorial distinction and seem worth quoting as “agreement.... more in the descriptive formulation of the phenomenal state of affairs than in the theoretical interpretation”:
“Since the organization and grouping of colors is not immaterial to the phenomenal appearance of the latter, Gelb and Goldstein conclude that their patient’s experience of colors differs from the chromatic experience which the normal person has, when he adopts the “categorial attitude ... . In the Gelb and Goldstein theory, the behavior of the patient is not interpreted as a mere intellectual deficiency, viz., the loss of the ability to subsume perceived colors under categories, while the very perceptual experience of colors remains unaltered, i.e., is with the patient the same as with normal persons. Merleau-Ponty sees here the “existentialist” rather than “intellectualist” character of their theory: “... Before being thought or knowledge, categorial activity is a certain manner of relating oneself to the world and. correlatively, a style or a configuration of experience.” Accordingly, “... The disturbance of thinking which is discovered at the basis of amnesia [of color names] ... does not so much concern the judgment but rather the experiential milieu in which the judgment arises; it concerns less the spontaneity than the grasp of that spontaneity on the sensible world and our power of projecting any intention into it.” (SPP 377, Gurwitsch’s translation of Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 222, amended).
“Merleau-Ponty contrasts
this, as he calls it, intellectualistic interpretation of Cassirer [in Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen, Bd. III (1929), Teil II, Kap. VI] with his own
existentialistic construal ... . According to Merleau-Ponty, the reduction to
the concrete attitude does not affect so much and in any case not primarily the
symbolic or generally in a proper sense the intellectual function but rather
the primordial, pre-logical, and pre-predicative experience, which all logical
performances are grounded on, and solely on the bases of which these
performances are initially possible.... (“Einleitung” to Kurt Goldstein. Selected
PapersjAusgewahlte Schriften, ed. Aron Gurwitsch, Else M. Goldstein Haudek,
and William E. Haudek,
[8] FC 166, cf. the passage quoted in n. 17 below. On Gurwitsch’s recognition of Merleau-Ponty’s opposition to psychological accounts in terms of causes and conditions, but not motives, cf. FC 295 & C 150 n. 154. For further discussion of the positions of the two men and of the matters themselves in this regard, see Lester Embree, “Merleau-Ponty’s Examination of Gestalt Psychology,” loc. cit, and “Gestalt Law in Phenomenological Perspective,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 10 (1979).
[9] “ Un objet est un organisme de couleurs, d’odeurs, de sons, d’apparences tactiles qui se symbolisent et se modifient l’un l’autre et s’accordent l’un avec l’autre....” (Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 48. cf. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 38).
[10] “Substantiality and Perceptual Coherence, Remarks on H. B. Veatch: Two Logics,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 2 (1972), p. 42.
[11] “Une coleur n’estjamais simplement coleur, mats couleur d’un certain objet, et le bleu d’un tapis ne seraitpas le même bleu s’il n’etait un bleu laineux” (Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 361, cf. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 313).
[12] “Substantiality and Perceptual Coherence,” p. 42.
[13] Mon expérience dans ces différents moments se lie à elle-même de telle manière que je n’ai pas différentes vues perspectives reliées par la conception d’un invariant.
…
Je n’ai pas une vue perspective, puis une autre, et entre elles une liason d’entendement, mais chaque perspective passe dans 1’autre et, si Ton peut encore parler de synthèse, il s’agit d’une ‘synthèse de transition.’” (Phénoménologie de la perception, 380, cf. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 329, and cf. FC 298 n. 58 and FC 299).
[14] FC 299-300. Some aspects of the matter at issue here between Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty are dealt with in the article by William McKenna in the present issue of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.
[15] It was,
above all, Merleau-Ponty [Phénoménologie
de la perception. Parts I, III,
and IV] who raised the problem of organization in relation to the schema of the
body
(“schème corporel”). In any given case of bodily performance a series of
organs take
part from which certain specific movements issue, while [still] other [organs]
assume
certain attitudes. It is not necessary to interpret this operating together [of
organs] in
the sense of a coordination proceeding step by step from member to member (“de
proche en proche”) until they are all included in the unity of the
performance—as
though each organ possessed in and for itself a function and mode of
functioning
proper to it and would only subsequently harmonize and agree with the others.
It is
rather the case that the different bodily organs taking part in executing a
performance
are organized in their interplay such that the movement, attitude, etc. of an
organ
requires the corresponding [movement, attitude, etc.] of the others, that all
of them
express themselves in and through one another or, as Merleau-Ponty likewise
formu
lates it: .”...sesparties [scl. “du corpspropre”].... ne sont pas déployées
les unes à côté
des autres, mais envelopées les unes dans les autres” [Ibid, p. 114; cf. Phenomenology
of Perception, p. 98: “its parts are ... not spread out side by side, but
enveloped in each
other.”]. The same organizational principle governs external perception and its
objects, whose modes of appearance, aspects, and perspectives (no matter if
they
pertain to the same or different sensuous realms) mutually imply (“l’implique”)
one
another in such a manner that they can be read off of each other (“se lisent
l’une dans
1’autre”), and that, in this sense, they signify one another (“se
signifient”), mutually
symbolize, modify, etc., each other [Ibid., Parts II, I, and III]. In
all of these cases it is
a question of pluralities—more correctly stated: of systems of moments (of
whatever
sort) which essentially determine each other by being together, and of which we
may
say that they “contain” one another. (Aron Gurwitsch, Leibniz, Philosophie
des
Panlogismus, p. 22, translation graciously supplied by Frederick Kersten).
[16] The “correspondence,” which is not intentional correlation, between changing kinaesthetic data and the changing appearances of extrasomatic objects of perception is discussed by Gurwitsch in Chapter 5 of Marginal Consciousness. Cf. FC 304. where the problem is raised in Merleau-Pontean terms and set aside as “too complex and too consequential to be discussed incidentally.....”
[17] “Surely, the point of view from which phenomenology considers consciousness is not the only possible one. Psychology, especially in its explanatory .phase, does not adopt it. However, if philosophical interests prevail, consciousness must be approached under the phenomenological reduction for ultimate clarification. In the very possibility of adopting both the naturalistic and the phenomenological point of view, there appears the ambiguous nature of consciousness. Its acts, on the one hand, depend functionally upon extra-conscious facts and events, in this sense being effects of the latter, and, on the other hand, have presentational and cognitive functions with regard to all mundane events and facts, including those upon which they depend causally” (FC 166).
[18] “Il y a certitude absolue du monde en général, mais non d’aucune chose en particulier” (Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 344, cf. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 297).
[19] .”...the body.... as it is experienced by the living, embodied, and involved subject ...” and “... as it appears to an onlooking, disinterested, and detached subject” (FC 169 n. 26).
[20] While this is relatively implicit in the writings published during Gurwitsch’s lifetime (cf. Lester Embree, “Everyday Social Relevancy in Gurwitsch and Schutz,” Annals of Phenomenological Sociology, Vol. 2 (1977), p. 47 for an explication), it is explicit in the posthumous Human Encounters in the Social World, trans. Frederick Kersten, Pittsburgh, Pa., Duquesne University Press, 1979 and in Marginal Consciousness, the latter more where the self is concerned and the former more where, interestingly enough, the other is concerned.