Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Spirit and The Word: Merleau-Ponty and Schutz in the Wake of the Husserlian Reduction.

Lighting and reflection, then, play their part only if they remain in the background as discreet intermediaries, and lead our gaze instead of arresting it. (Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. P. 361)

The sciences that would interpret and explain human action and thought must begin with a description of the foundational structures of what is pre-scientific, the reality which seems self-evident to men remaining within the natural attitude.(Schutz, Structures of the Lifeworld. P. 3)

On the other hand what is particularly proper to the essence of the incipient philosophy of a phenomenon or rather a universe of phenomena. Its beginning course, like that carried out above in rough outlines, is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naïve self-evidence this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that, as we have said before, rather than having a ground of things taken for granted and ready in advance, as does objective philosophy, it excludes in principle a ground of this or any other sort. Thus it must begin without any underlying ground. But immediately it achieves the possibility of creating a ground for itself through its own powers, namely in mastering, through original self-reflection, the naïve world as transformed into. It possesses no formed logic and methodology in advance and can achieve its method and even the genuine sense of its accomplishments only through ever renewed self-reflections. Its fate (understood subsequently, to be sure, as an essentially necessary one) is to become involved again and again in paradoxes, which, arising out of uninvestigated and even unnoticed horizons, remain functional and announce themselves as incomprehensibilities. (Edmund Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. P. 181)

A philosophy becomes transcendental, or radical, not by taking its place in absolute consciousness without mentioning the ways by which this is reached, but by considering itself as a problem; not by postulating a knowledge rendered totally explicit, but by recognizing as the fundamental philosophic problem this presumption on reason’s part. (Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. P. 73)

The current undertaking was motivated by a vague attempt to situate, and link up, the works of Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz in relation to the larger Husserlian project of phenomenological inquiry itself. Certain trajectories, or possible ways of engaging with this theme offered themselves to my attention and, in turn, led me to the understanding that such an undertaking would necessarily have to reckon with the tradition of phenomenology, with the traditionalized/traditionalizing structure of the works undertaken in the phenomenological attitude. Are Schutz and Merleau-Ponty united in a rejection of transcendental phenomenology? In a rejection of the transcendental reduction?[1] Or, is this perhaps what Paul Ricoeur meant when he claimed that “…in a broad sense phenomenology is both the sum of Husserl’s own variations and the heresies issuing from it.”?[2] These questions led me to turn back to The Crises of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. This encounter with the Crises—informed by the possibility that I had, here before me, examples of the heretical trajectories of phenomenology—left me with a powerful sense that the text was written in order to ensure the reactivation of a certain trajectory of thought.[3] I had a feel for a late Husserl, in a mad dash against the necessities of his own finitude, attempting to iron out a final work, which would clarify the path of the reduction and provide an example of its proper functioning.[4] As such, following this reading of the Crises I have emerged with the sense of a phenomenological method, guided at all times by the possibility of a genuine transcendental reduction,[5] constantly presupposing the possibility of its ground, the possibility of its synthesis, or its centre, hence, vigilant in the face of the numerous paradoxes it uncovers for itself.
The difference between Schutz and Merleau-Ponty lies in the difference between the letter and the spirit of a work. 1- In the case of Schutz, evidenced in the appended note in the first chapter of The Phenomenology of the Social Sciences, we are presented with an aversion, or perhaps an omission, of the “transcendental reduction,’ because Schutz’s endeavour “does not require the achievement of a transcendental knowledge.”[6] In Schutz’s constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude we find a project, taking place within the limits explicitly articulated by the work of Husserl. [7] Schutz, although, for the most part, staying clear of performing the reduction in his own work, nonetheless places his work within the phenomenological tradition by engaging with the first epoché. While this initial epoché was intended as a preliminary stage on the way to a genuine transcendental phenomenology, this does not take anything away from Schutz, or Husserl, save to say that in the latter’s estimation it does not go far enough. 2- In the preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty states that: “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”[8] A certain reading of this statement has been used to support the thesis that Merleau-Ponty, especially in his late works, abandons both the reduction and phenomenology itself. I will take the position that, in the case of Merleau-Ponty, we do not have a rejection of transcendental phenomenology, but a privileging of its movement without the presupposition of its idealistic end.[9] As such, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty, following the un-thought, or the “flesh” of Husserl,[10] and armed with his conception of the body, does not reject the reduction, but, rather uncovers it as an infinite movement, as a constant inquiry, or questioning; maintaining its telos as a possibility, without seeking to realize it in the transcendental ego. Rather, the transcendental field, for Merleau-Ponty, resides in the divergence, ecart, or space, between thought and experience.
The “life-world” marks a return to the natural attitude, to the pre-theoretical, pre-objective, mode of encountering the world in wide-awake everyday existence. As such, for Husserl, the “life-world,” is “the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science.”[11] The concept of the life-world is made explicit in the midst of a critique of Kant[12] beginning in sec 28, “ Kant’s unexpressed “presupposition”: the surrounding world of life, taken for granted as valid.”[13] This presupposition takes on vital importance when we understand that for Kant: “…all judgements about the same object must agree with one another, and thus the objective validity of the judgement of experience means nothing other than its necessary universal validity.”[14] Kant’s world, therefore, is nothing other than the world as interpreted by the objective sciences. It is the case, therefore, that the uncovering of the “life-world” problematizes the epistemological foundations of the “objective sciences.” The practical success of the theoretical attitude in the objectivizing sciences, therefore, resides upon the forgotten horizon of the subjective-relative givenness of the “life-world.” Making the “life-world” thematic, that is the ability to render it open for a kind of viewing, necessitates the adoption of the first epoché. Although our encountering of the “life-world” is subjective relative, the general structure of the “life-world” is not.
This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. We can attend to it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all.[15]
Husserl, therefore, outlines a trajectory, which will illuminate the distinction between the objective naturalistic approach, with the subjective relative, general structure of the life-world.
What is needed, then would be a systematic division of the universal structures–universal life-world a priori and universal “objective” a priori–and then also a division among the universal inquiries according to the way in which the “objective” a priori is grounded in the “subjective-relative” a priori of the life-world or how, for example, mathematical self-evidence has its source of meaning and source of legitimacy in the self-evidence of the life-world.[16]
This work, namely the suspension, or “bracketing,” of the world of the objective sciences, is the work of the phenomenologist; hence he/she participates in a vocational epoché, in a vocational time, which we, as those participating in the phenomenological attitude, necessarily share.
Schutz’s project, despite the stated reservation in the appended note remains loyal to the letter of the Husserlian project. If we return to the quote provided at the onset of the current examination, we can see how closely Schutz retains the problem of the “life-world,” precisely as it was articulated by Husserl in the Crises.
The sciences that would interpret and explain human action and thought must begin with a description of the foundational structures of what is pre-scientific, the reality which seems self-evident to men remaining within the natural attitude.[17]
Schutz’s project, remaining within the realm of the first epoché, confines itself to the acts of constitutive consciousness. The self-evidencies, of everyday experience are given to us in a generalized structure of traditionality, hence are inter-subjectively co-constituted. These objectivities are co-constituted in the “subjective-meaning-context” of a shared social and communal existence. Schutz’s investigation is of the objective order, encountered in a certain ‘style’ of experience, a “finite province of meaning,” a mode of apprehending in a certain way. The objective is hence reduced to the subjective-relative, hence appears to have a kind of ontic validity. “The course of life is a series of situations,”[18] which are always already determinate in terms of the limits imposed upon it by my “stock of knowledge.” The open elements of situations are, in principle, open to infinite explication. These open elements are brought into the view of my “interpretive schema,” my “stock of knowledge” which is in turn composed of various levels of historical sedimentation. These sedimentations are presupposed as objectifications, or “types,” which are available to me in my “stock of knowledge.” The degree to which my “stock of knowledge” is equipped to deal with the situation will determine the degree, or the ease with which I am able to render the open elements of the situation determinate, and thereby act within the given situation. The “pragmatic motive” determines what elements remain open in a given situation; that is to say if I am pragmatically motivated I am unlikely to open elements which need not be opened in my attempt to “master the situation.” Schutz’s work makes manifest the anonymity of intersubjective co-constitution, which determines the life-world in a normative way. As such it does not seem incorrect to say that Schutz’s project contributes to the possibility of the transcendental reduction. Schutz’s project taking place at an intermediary step on the way, by rendering the everyday, common sense, encountering, of the “life-world” thematic. Returning to the appended note, for a moment, we might be struck by the omission of affect in Schutz work. This omission, it would seem is somehow related to the omission of taking his analysis further. Affect, is somehow more primordial than the acting-ego, of Schutz constitutive account. Husserl recognizes the importance, and necessity of this initial step, perhaps an attempt to establish a positive science, however:
What is a mutual externality for the natural-mundane attitude of world-life prior to the epoché, because of the localization of souls in living bodies, is transformed in the epoché into a pure, intentional, mutual internality. With this the world–the straightforwardly existing world and, within it, existing nature–is transformed into the all-communal phenomenon “world,” world for all actual and possible subjects,” none of whom can escape the intentional implication according to which he belongs in advance within the horizon of every other subject.[19]
Husserl’s move toward a “transcendental experience,” the opening of the phenomenological field, must be understood as a reduction of the world as an empirical pre-given experience, what remains, rather is the “world” as phenomenon. The opening of the transcendental field is a progressive movement, a movement in steps requiring multiple reflections, the possibility of creating a ground, a possibility, which Husserl always presupposes as a possibility.
The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its concrete world phenomenon, systematically inquire back, and thereby become acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the system of its constitutive levels and its incredibly intricate [patterns of] validity founding… In this systematic procedure one at first attains the correlation between the world and transcendental subjectivity as objectified in mankind.”[20]
This does not alter anything in the nature of the “life-world,” that is to say that Schutz’s engagement would remain experienceable in precisely the way it was outlined. However, in this reduction we no longer have the life-world as an empirical entity, but rather as a phenomenon of consciousness. The opening of this field is precisely the opening of the possibility, the transcendental possibility, of meaning, as simultaneously activity and passivity.
“At this point, following Descartes, we make the great reversal that, if made in the right manner, leads to transcendental subjectivity: the turn to the ego cogito as the ultimate and apodictically certain basis for judgments, the basis on which any radical philosophy must be grounded.”[21]
Husserl refers to this ur-consciousness as the flowing cogito. On the one side, the side of noesis and noemata, we would have the form of intention without content and on the side of the morphe-hyle we would have content, or sensate, without form. The noema, therefore, is the meaning, form, or idea, of the intended hyle, which is content without form. These structures run parallel to each other, in a kind of interweaving, which for Husserl is always already a synthesis.
“Their unity is a unity of synthesis: not merely a continuous connectedness of cogitations (as it were, a being stuck to one another externally), but a connectedness that makes the unity of one consciousness, in which the unity of an intentional objectivity, as “the same” objectivity/belonging to multiple modes of appearance, becomes constituted.”[22]
On both sides we are in the vicinity of an opening, on the side of the intention we have the noema, which is meaningful but irreal, and on the other, we have the hyle as the real, and hence temporal, immanent object of the intention. We are as it were at the site of the opening, which the various reductions have made manifest, the distinction between nature and mind. How is the transcendental object, the hyle, or sensed thing in general given to the noematic intention? Or, perhaps, how is activity and passivity unified in the universal synthesis of the fundamental form of consciousness? Husserl’s treatment of time, in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, allows him to import the idea of the ‘now’ as the moment, which although failing to appear in-itself as such, allows for the noematic re-presentation, or ‘presentification,’ of the hyle.[23]
“At first, to be sure, the possibility of a pure phenomenology of consciousness seems highly questionable, since the realm of phenomena of consciousness is truly the realm of Heraclitean flux.”[24]
Husserl treats “perception as the ‘self-giving’ of an actual present, which has its correlate in the given of what is past,” however, the ‘now’ only appears in ‘recollection’ in a manner wholly other than the ‘now’ of perception.[25] The “idea which allow for the flux to be arrested in the moment, in the absence, which is filled by the determination “now” which is a certain nothing in actuality, yet becomes determinate in recollection. The strange use of the “idea” is what allows for the possibility of synthesis. Husserl’s inquiry, his movement, has given us access to the gap, between nature and absolute subjectivity, to the always determinable indeterminate. Ideas function in this way, to give us a certain recollection of an invisible, a silence, the retention of a significance, which is never present in the sense in which an object is present for thought. Husserl’s reflections on time give us a glimpse at the strange presence of an un-reflected in reflection.
In his work the The Philosopher and His Shadow, Merleau-Ponty engages with the unthought of Husserl’s work. Perhaps, to state it differently, Merleau-Ponty engages with the spirit of the movement of phenomenology, rather than the expressed articulations, or the letter of Husserl himself. Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Husserl is precisely informed by the reduction, by the opening which the reduction unfolds, which points to a third way between object and subject. The third way which takes place in the body’s[26] relation to itself as the “vinculum” between self and things.[27] We must, first of all, be clear that Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “pre-noetic” bodily encountering of the world, which, precedes the vulgar subject object distinction, and precedes both thought and speech. Merleau-Ponty’s return to the “there-is,” to the world experience, perhaps, the background of any possible experience in general, is a movement beyond the reduction to the primordial ‘is’ of an essence, which cannot be uncovered by a positive viewing; but rather that being-in-the-world of existing, which involves every essential ‘is.’ The field of experience is uncovered in this being-in, which is uncovered as a lived bodily experience, and not the result of the eidetic reduction of a thing-in-general. We have the best articulation of this position in the notion of the “perceptual faith,” that perception gives us the things themselves in a passive viewing. Merleau-Ponty alludes to the pre-linguistic, pre-objective world of silence, a world of mute experience.[28] Across the abyss of the self, whose ‘environs’ or ‘edges’ we are trying to illuminate, we find the active pole. Is the active pole always already a response to the world to the experience of others? An active pole responding, as it were, to the imperative to speak the silence of the visible, or rather to have the silence speak through it.
“The pure spectator in me, which elevates each thing to an essence, which produces its ideas, is assured that it touches Being with them only because it emerges within an actual experience surrounded by actual experiences, by the actual world, by the actual Being, which is the ground of the predicative Being.”[29]
Is this not the presence of nature, both inside and outside of the self? Is this not the “operating intentionality like that which animates time, more ancient than the intentionality of human acts.”[30] This movement, this “flesh[31]” of existence, is the body, my body, the movement of corporeal existence, which gives me a visible, because I am of it, I am one such visible amongst visibles. If we can speak of a “flesh” of the world and a “flesh” of the body, perhaps they are of a shared flesh, in the sense that both are a kind of perceptible. The flesh is not an object of thought, but a possibility of perception, giving me a kind of self-presence, which is at the same time an absence from self an intertwining of a visible and an invisible. For Merleau-Ponty it is but a matter of “situating” ourselves within the being we are dealing with, rather than attempting to posit some absolute outside, from some “gods eye view.” We must attend to the dehiscence of the body in the “fabric of our life”…”which opens it to itself and opens us upon it, and which, in the case of essence, is the dehiscence of the speaking and the thinking.”[32]
We are, once again, in the vicinity of this forgetting which seems to enable us to go further. However, for the phenomenologist, engaged in the phenomenological attitude, this forgetting is somehow different, perhaps, because this forgetting is precisely an issue for it.
Establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins, the aging Husserl used to say. Precisely because we owe so much to tradition, we are in no position to see just what belongs to it.[33]
The forgotten is silent, but never ceases to be a possibility, that is capable of being rendered, or expressed, perhaps shared. Merleau-Ponty seems to forget the ground, which Husserl seems to have continuously presupposed as possible. Or, rather, more correctly he displaces the possibility of a ground, which would be neither an inside, nor an outside. A ground, which is not a transcendental ego, nor a nature in itself, is nothing really, but is constantly expressed in its absence. The problem of the ‘life-world’ is a silent one, a meaningful silence that animates. What, therefore, is the meaning of the often quoted line in The Phenomenology of Perception?
“All the misunderstandings with his interpreters, with the existentialist ‘dissidents’ and finally with himself, have arisen from the fact that in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it and, also, from the fact that from this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world. The most important lesson which the reduction teaches is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”[34]
Is this ‘we’ who have made this radical break with familiarity not the ‘we’ of the phenomenologist engaged in the reduction? Is the phenomenologist not privy to a vocational time within which he/she works in the wake of explicit thoughts, and silent traces; whose field of presence retains within it the entirety of the past? Merleau-Ponty’s statement does not abandon the transcendental, but rather displaces its Husserlian centre in the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty remains close to the work of Husserl, to what is given through the work of Husserl.
Husserl himself never obtained one sole Wesenschau that he did not take up again and rework, not to disown it, but in order to make it say what at first it had not quite said. Thus it would be naïve to seek solidity in a heaven of ideas or a ground (fond) of meaning–it is neither above nor beneath the appearances, but at their joints; it is the tie that secretly connects an experience to its variants.[35]
What remains important for Merleau-Ponty is the inquiry opened up by the reduction, the gap which it uncovers makes reflection an issue for itself, as the gap continues to be rendered determinate in its absence such that it is never the “unreflected which challenges reflection; it is reflection which challenges itself.”[36] Once philosophy recognizes this problematic it is capable of taking its proper place as a kind of radical reflection, perhaps a “hyper-reflection.” The reduction is never complete, because it remains resigned to its beginning, to a constant re-iteration, re-statement, re-petition. Merleau-Ponty claims in a working note of The Visible and The invisible “this is to be understood not as an imperfection… but as a philosophical theme: the incompleteness of the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.––[37]
…Being no longer being before me, but surrounding me and in a sense traversing me, my vision of Being not forming itself from elsewhere, but from the midst of Being–the alleged facts, the spatio-temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on axes, the pivots, the dimensions, the generality of my body, and the ideas are therefore already encrusted in its joints.[38]


What is this light which leads? Do we all participate in it? Borrow from it? Work in its wake? In the following examination has examined the trajectory of light as it has, perhaps, emerged from both the explicit and the unthought work of Husserl. Although the light necessarily predates him, he has managed to reflect it in various direction. This light allows the silence to continue onward in the silent sedimentation of our human traditions. Schutz and Merleau-Ponty take place simultaneously, that is to say that their work can be taken together without diminishing either. If we project unto Husserl—that which many scholars seem to want to hear from him—the notion we have a kind of transparent access to ourselves in the constituting pole of the transcendental ego, then the existence of divergent projects, or “heresies” seems to demonstrate a failure on his part. However, if we see the phenomenological methos as an opening of a question, as a methodical questioning of foundations, then heresy seems to be the wrong terminology. If indeed it is a matter of choice at all?











Bibliography
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill. (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1971).

Immanuel Kant. Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself As A Science. Trans Peter G. Lucas. (Manchester University Press 1959).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Eds Len Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. Robert C. McCleary. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith (Routledge Classics: New York, 2002).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible. Trans Alphonso Lingis. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

Ricoeur, Paul. Husserl An Analysis of his Phenomenology. Trans Edward G. Ballard. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

Schutz, Alfred and T. Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World. Trans R. Zaner & H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (Evanston: Northwestern, 1973).

Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. G. Walsh & F. Flehnert. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967) of Der Sinnehafte Aubau der Socialen Welt. Springer, 1932.











[1] My research has brought to my attention a number of works wherein this is precisely the argument presented, for example in the work of Richard Zaner.
[2] Paul Ricoeur. Husserl An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Trans. Edward. G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967. P. 4.
[3] The importance of writing in the establishment of a transcendental field ought not escape our attention.
[4] I am thinking here of the “exemplarity” of The Origin of Geometry.
[5] Specifically, for a ground in the transcendental ego, as that constituting ego, upon which a constructive transcendental movement might be uncovered.
[6] Alfred Schutz. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Trans. G. Walsh & F. Flehnert. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967) of Der Sinnehafte Aubau der Socialen Welt. Springer, 1932. 44.
[7] By explicit, I mean to say that Schutz can be said to be taking up the explicit directedness of Husserl provides for in the Crises. Namely sec 36, 37, 38, also sec 51.
[8]Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith (Routledge Classics: New York, 2002). P. XV
[9]Even in the cases where scholars have argued that the quote above, indeed, rejects the reduction, we are presented with the view that this rejection did not occur until his later works. However, is it not the case that the Phenomenology of Perception is guided by an attempt to chart a middle way between Intellectualism and Empiricism? Did Merleau-Ponty ever have the transcendental ego in mind as a constituting centre?
[10] That is following in the spirit, as opposed to the letter.
[11]Edmund Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. P. 48.
[12] It has been suggested that the critique of Kant is, at the same time a self critique of Husserl’s previous works. If this opinion is true than it would also be true that the “life-world” would be a novel development of the Crises. See David Carr. Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. P. 132
[13] Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences. P. 103.
[14] Immanuel Kant. Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself As A Science. Trans Peter G. Lucas. Manchester University Press 1959. p. 56 [297-9].
[15] Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences. P. 139.
[16] Ibid., P. 140.
[17] Schutz, Alfred and T. Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World. Trans R. Zaner & H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern, 1973. P. 3.
[18] Schutz. Structures of the Life-World. P. 113.
[19] Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences. P254-256.
[20] Ibid., P. 187.
[21] Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).P. 18.
[22] Husserl. Cartesian Meditations. p. 41-42.
[23] The ‘idea’ of the ‘now’ allows for the ‘retention’ of a just past, which would, however, be nothing itself without the possibility of ‘protention’ as the going forth of a modified ‘now’ into a ‘now’ which is only anticipated.
[24] Husserl. Cartesian Meditations. P. 49.
[25] Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1971. p 63.
[26] The body is a unique unity in that it is both “intentional,” that is toward things, and “sense-giving,” or constitutive of those things. The relationship between “constitution” and “acquisition,” and ‘being’ and ‘having’ is of paramount importance in Merleau-Ponty’s illumination of corporeal existence.
[27]Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Signs. Trans. Robert C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.P. 166.
[28] “Yet there is a world of silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language significations—yes, non-language significations, but they are not accordingly positive. There is for example no absolute flux of singular Erlebnisse; there are fields and a field of fields, with a style and a typicality…” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. p. 171.
[29]Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and The Invisible. P. 110.
[30]Merleau-Ponty. Signs. P. 165.
[31] It is possible to speak of “flesh,” although we must be wary of treating it as a concept, or of the conceptual order given Merleau-Ponty expressed aversion to the conceptualization of the world. It is rather an “element” of being.
[32]Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and The Invisible. p 118.
[33] Merleau-Ponty. Signs. P. 159.
[34] Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. P. XV. (My italics)
[35] Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible.. p. 116.
[36] Merleau-Ponty. Signs. P. 161.
[37] Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible. p. 178.
[38] Ibid., p 114.

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