Saturday, December 01, 2007
PHIL3419 - Second Essay
This essay will analyse Levinas’ critique of Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. In particular, it will concentrate on Levinas’ essays “On Subjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” and “Meaning and Sense” and their critical stance on Merlau-Ponty’s paper “The Philosopher and His Shadow”. I will firstly lay out a detailed textual analysis of Levinas’ position on Merleau-Ponty and follow with an interpretation of his ‘ethical relation’ . Throughout this analysis I will make reference to the sections of Merleau-Ponty that Levinas is critiquing. From this textual analysis I aim to show that Levinas’ critique is weak and his account of intersubjectivity is apparent in Merleau-Ponty. I achieve this by showing the ethical relation within Merlau-Ponty’s work.
In the paper “The Philosopher and His Shadow” Merleau-Ponty examines the phenomenological reduction of Husserl and in doing so he puts forward the foundations of his own account of intersubjectivity, which is later expounded in his major work Phenomenology of Perception. Firstly, Levinas argues in “Meaning and Sense” that Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity is problematic, in that Merleau-Ponty’s subject subsumes the other’s alterity, and so Merleau-Ponty’s subject is sovereign . I will explain why Levinas uses his own interpretation, that Merleau-Ponty’s subject’s own subjectivity is imposed over mutual knowledge, as a wedge with which to critique Merleau-Ponty. Secondly Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty’s ontological account does not explain the subject’s initial orientation toward the other, and that this is problematic because it implies that there is an initiator of relations that leaves Merleau-Ponty’s account incomplete. Levinas proposes in its place an account of intersubjectivity that does not rely on mutual knowledge by expounding the ethical relation – an account of the orientation of the subject toward the other, prior to knowledge.
In this essay, I will attempt to show that Merleau-Ponty already essentially contains the ethical relation as understood by Levinas, in that he presents intersubjectivity as an ambiguity that is both ethical and cultural. Here I will begin with an analysis of why Levinas breaks away from the ontological tradition. Examining in some detail three focuses of Levinas’ critique; the body, the sovereign subject, and ‘sedimentation’ .
Phenomenology has traditionally been studied in an ontological form, from Husserl through to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is this form of the ontological that Levinas attempts to break from, and in so doing create a new vocabulary for phenomenology. Levinas is critical of (the traditional phenomenological form of) ontological study because of its reliance on the assumption that categories of knowledge exist previous to and inform relations with others. For Levinas, this is unacceptable; thus, he gives up the ontological approach to phenomenology in favour of his own claim, that the relation between the subject and other exists prior to knowledge. This is the crux of Levinas’ objection to Merleau-Ponty – that his ontologically founded approach destroys the alterity of the other because it forgets or covers over the fact that the other cannot be reduced to the same.
I will firstly begin with the critique of the body that Levinas puts forward, and how he finds Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the body unsuitable for his project. For Merleau-Ponty begins with the body; the body is the subject. The first problem for Levinas then is to determine the manner in which Merleau-Ponty constructs the body as subject. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is already constituted with a structure of understanding of what is being experienced; the body as a home for perception is perceiving in categories of knowledge. He points out that the body is “meshed into the visible world” and is yet aware of its reference to those things in the world. Levinas remarks that Merleau-Ponty only mentions an in-between (the subject and the world) which is not constructed from categories of knowledge, this is where Levinas intends to begin. The body that Merleau-Ponty constructs is not reduced to a condition that Levinas is satisfied to begin his project with. Levinas does not want this body that is already filled with understanding, and a frame of reference on the world, because such a body would, according to Levinas, seek to understand the other - and to do so would be to limit and destroy the other’s alterity. For understanding is a process in which the foreign is made the same in the subject’s totality. Levinas wants to avoid the Hegelian dialectic of subsumation of the other by the subject because, as he claims, the uniqueness of the other would be lost. But Merleau-Ponty does not restate such a dialectic, contrary to Levinas’ claims; rather he pursues an understanding of space through the motility (and intentionality) of the body. Merleau-Ponty prescribes signification on the interaction between the body and the world, whereby meaning is induced by how the subject uses the world and is affected in turn by the world. It is through this motility that Merleau-Ponty makes the connection between interiority and exteriority and ascertains that the other is in the world of the subject. Levinas is critical of Merleau-Ponty grounding the relationship between subject and other in the same world. He insists that Merleau-Ponty does rely on shared knowledge, which is actually a construct of the subject. So Levinas is critical of the body that Merleau-Ponty proposes because of its built-in functions of understanding that allow it a dominating role in the relationship it has with the other. Levinas focuses his account of subjectivity on the space between the subject and the world, and this is where he posits his subject, void of any framework of understanding.
Now I turn to the problem of the sovereign subject that Levinas raises in Merleau-Ponty’s intentionality. The intentionality that is bound to the subject’s motility is not subjectivity but, Merleau-Ponty claims, is affected by the world. Despite this Levinas argues that such intentionality creates a sway of sovereign power held by the subject over the other. Although shaped by the world, of which the other is a part, intentionality forms a framework for motility and is thus thrown back onto the world (and so onto the other, who is in the world). Levinas contends that via motility the subject presupposes the condition and prepares itself to meet the other by creating an alter-ego – hypothetical other – based on subjectivity. The alter-ego is a structure that allows the subject to relate to the other via similarities. The other will either live up to or disappoint these similarities. Regardless the subject is sovereign in the sense that the process of relation had been chosen by the subject. Whatever is in the world to be perceived must conform to the process of relation by the subject in order to be interpreted. The key point for Levinas is that the alterity of the other, the essential disruption, cannot be accounted for in any structure unless it has already been perceived. In which case the subject’s motility is not the first orientation to the other. Yet Merleau-Ponty presents the affectation of the world upon the subject as an opening up of the body and argues that the other is also met in these terms. If the alterity of the other is genuinely met in this opening of the body to the world, and the world to the body, then it should be reflected in the subject’s motility. Setting up the other between the world and the subject allows Levinas to avoid having motility reflect the alterity of the other. Alternatively Levinas does not require motility to explain the relationship to the other because the relationship is not occurring meshed in the world.
Finally, before turning directly to Merleau-Ponty, an examination of sedimentation will strengthen Levinas. Merleau-Ponty’s construction of meaning between the body and the world is derived from the lateral differences between them. The motility of the body opens it to being affected by the world, and the body has intentionality that effects the world. Merleau-Ponty calls the building up of meaning, via signification, sedimentation. The subject casts an intention over a object in the world by acting on it, and the action itself is shaped by the physicality of the object; signification takes the form of Culture, the world takes on the signification of motility and reciprocates. Having established this reciprocity Merleau-Ponty seeks to replicate a similar reciprocity between the body of the subject and the body of the other. Both bodies are affecting and effecting sedimentation and they share the same perceptual field as a background for the objects they perceive in the world. Perception is ambiguous, according to Merleau-Ponty, and in order to distinguish between things being perceived they need to stand out from something. The sedimentation of the subject serves as the background of the world from which perception is able to take place; sedimentation creates the context and contrast from which objects in the world can be foregrounded and illuminated from the rest of the world. Levinas finds fault in the signification the subject applies to the perceived world. Levinas argues that sedimentation cannot be the first relation because the subject signifies over and above the perceived world. The significations of the subject become more meaningful than mere perception, and of another order than that which is perceived. What Levinas is pointing to is that the alterity that the other is giving over is not of the same origin as sedimentation.
Using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeality I will argue that Merleau-Ponty successfully posits perception as ambiguous despite Levinas criticisms. Intercorporeality, the subject and other belonging to the same meta-body, is Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to show the origins of cultural signification as the same as the gift of the other. The issue of intercorporeality, and especially Merleau-Ponty’s example of hands touching, is complex and warrants a hefty examination, yet for the sake of space I will use it only to illustrate the point of ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty is able to establish the perception as blurred between, the body as an object (that is perceived), and the body as a subject (that perceives). The distinction between what is touching and what is being touched does not exist; this is what the double touching demonstrates. The subject touches the left hand with the right, and in doing so feels the touch and the touching the left hand, and vice versa - a bodily reflection. The reflection results in confusion between the touched and the touching. So, in this case, Merleau-Ponty destroys the distinction between subject and object.
If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body, it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body’s operations, the terminus its exploration ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body.
The lack of distinction implies for Merleau-Ponty the sameness of “fabric”, which draws out the metaphor that the subject and other belong to a similar body, an intercorporeality, like two hands. Levinas points out that the difficulty of intercorporeality lies in the fact that it is an affirmation of a shared knowledge of things in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of the subject and other as two hands implies that each has knowledge of their part in the whole, and receives direction from that whole. What Levinas is highlighting is that Merleau-Ponty’s subject dominates shared knowledge, and so it is always the subject that ultimately totalises the difference of the other within understanding. For example Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty’s account of sentiment remains based in knowledge because it relies on a system of values in order to be interpreted. For Levinas, a system of values must be understood by the subject previous to a relationship with the other. The values are possessed by the subject, perceived and understood by the subject alone and are not transferable to the other. Levinas claims that the handshake is not a vehicle for sentiment, but is sentiment itself. In doing so he removes any need for a system of values in order to interpret the sentiment that is being passed between the subject and the other. The sentiment is not being passed in the motility of the handshake, instead the sentiment is being actualised in motility and does not need to be mediated nor categorised.
Levinas is drawing out a different mode of relation to that of Merleau-Ponty. Instead of drawing a bodily connection in the touching Levinas argues that the relation is made by a ‘radical separation’ between the two bodies. So for Levinas there is no mediating intercorporeal connection between the two bodies and no system of mutual knowledge. What is left are two unmediated bodies, constructed without understanding of the world they perceive, and without intercorporeality. From here, Levinas proposes a starting point outside of history, because history implies that the other is already a part of the same. He develops the subject’s relation toward an absolute and unknowable infinity that is ethical, because ethics is aside and apart from history. The relationship between the subject and other is now an ethical relation - an insatiatable desire to experience the other’s unknown alterity in a way that is unmediated and hospitable, completely without the totalising effects of understanding nor the assumptions of mutual knowledge.
The ethical relation allows Levinas to construct an account of intersubjectivity without ontology. In doing so he incorporates the subject’s orientation toward the other as a desire not to own the alterity of the other but to experience this foreign alterity. For the ethical relation insists that morality, not history, is the first signification. The ethical relation is primordial but continually refreshed and recurring throughout relations with the other, existing previous to thought, decision making, and knowledge. The desire to experience the alterity (otherness) of the other without understanding it, avoids the destruction of the alterity that Levinas argues is present in Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality. Desire can be understood in terms of opposition to need, where need is the consumption of something other than self for enjoyment resulting in fulfilment (e.g. eating) which can be satiated. Whereas desire is insatiatable and is not for the consumption of the something other but to be in the presence of the other’s alterity. The orientation of the subject to the other, for Levinas, is ethical in the responsibility the subject feels for the preservation of the alterity that the subject desires.
Levinas uses the metaphor of the face – le visage – in order to explain the nature of the ethical relation. The face is an appearance of the other that signifies without context and perfectly, but is also the single reason for the expression of the subject. The signification of the other stands alone, it has no schema attached to it and is not related to any body of knowledge. For the other does not occupy the world, its infinity breaks the ego of the subject in an unrelenting movement toward the subject. The face is an overwhelming apparition that completely smothers the totality of self held by the subject, but it does not destroy that totality; rather it speaks, and it is the act of speech that makes the subject question itself. This is the first signification that Levinas puts forward in contrast to the cultural signification he critiques in Merleau-Ponty. There exists no measures of judgment because a sense of morality is required in order to make judgement. The other is the first gesture of morality and in the very face of the other is an infinity, a nothing. There is nothing that can say more, that can express an infinity larger, than the one expressed by the face; the face gives more than it ever receives. The infinity presented to the subject places a responsibility upon the subject to respond. In the subject’s questioning of its own ego it is made aware of this responsibility. It is the subject’s arrival to its own sense of responsibility that makes this relationship inherently moral. There is not a set of processes or announcements in orientation, rather the orientation is the first moment of urgent self-questioning. There is a sense in Being brought up by the force of speech flowing only to the subject from the other. The flow coming from the other cannot be constrained with knowledge or culture as it is with Merleau-Ponty, nor can it be linear, for the saying is direct and contentless, it is epiphany alone. The ethical relation precedes all cultural relations and allows Levinas to explain why in the first instance the subject is oriented toward the other; why the relationship exists at all.
Let me now argue that in two separate modes Merleau-Ponty incorporates the ethical relation into intercorporeality. Firstly as the body of the subject that exists for the other and not for the self. This is the extroceptive body that is examined in “The Child’s Relations with Others” – the body of the subject exists for-others before the subject is knowledgeable of their own body. It cannot be wholly perceived by the subject at any stage; like a camera lens it cannot capture itself. Merleau-Ponty argues that the existence of the body as a perceivable object in the world is a primordial orientation toward others and that without a concrete perception of one’s own body there can be no clear separation between the subject and the other. Furthermore the mirror phase never completes a concrete perception of the subject’s body for-others. A specular image is created whereby the subject comes to recognise that their body exists for-others, one that has been and continues to be an expression for-others. The specular image represents the subject’s own infinity back toward them and as such creates an alienation. The subject lives with this alienation by idealising the specular image in the mirror in vanity, for there is no constant nor overbearing control that the subject’s consciousness may have over the body-for-others. Here Merleau-Ponty has a relationship with others that is not consciousness nor sedimentation. The alienation Merleau-Ponty describes with the specular image is a representation of the (greater) alienation that occurs with the other. The alienation experienced by the subject in relation to the other is similar to the radical separation that Levinas uses as a basis for the ethical relation. Consequently in the mirror phase Merleau-Ponty examines the alterity of the other and its effect on the subject via the subject’s reflexive grasping of the image of its own alterity. The specular image does not destroy the subject as the felt but throws the formation of self as feeling into question. Prior to the specular image the child’s sense is not limited to the body but feels for-others; the specular image throws a singularity, the body, into the feeling for-others. So Merleau-Ponty accounts for the subject/other relationship on both cultural and ethical grounds. There exists for Merleau-Ponty no processes in the sense that there is not a lineation of one event after another and so there is no precultural account.
Secondly Merleau-Ponty argues that the subject/other relation is fundamentally ambiguous and blurred. That the relation is simultaneously oriented ethically and culturally, so that the subject relates with the other in both modes. In Merleau-Ponty’s examination of ‘psychological rigidity’ he develops an ethics from the subject’s choice of self value in the body for-itself over the in-itself. There exists both a relation to the other that is ethical and a relation that is cultural. The two relations are to be understood as inseparable and working as perception simultaneously, in complete delineation. Merleau-Ponty stresses the point of understanding these two relations together.
What must be understood, moreover, is that the question of a causal sequence of the two phenomena is meaningless. For it to be meaningful would require that the two phenomena be capable of standing in isolation. But this is never the case.
Perception is ambiguous at its very first in the body’s orientation. At once it views the other in the world, culturally enmeshed, while also viewing the other in-between the subject and the world, appearing alone as an alterity that alienates. Speech highlights the ambiguity of perception in its two fundamental presuppositions, which are firstly, that speech requires shared gestures to form a background to communication, that it is built up by sedimentation and secondly, that speech is fundamentally animated outside of culture by the disorientation, the will to communicate, that is caused by the alterity of the other. There are subjects who are in denial of perceptual ambiguity and thus rely on an ambivalence of attitude. However, underneath an ambivalent attitude (which Merleau-Ponty calls a mask) perception is still ambiguous - as such the denial of the ambiguity of perception is a denial of how the world affects the subject and how the alterity of the other affects the subject , and both are indifferences to difference. Merleau-Ponty outlines the concept of ‘rigid liberalism’ (a unique sub-type of psychological rigidity) which he uses to explain the importance of difference, a point that Levinas raises as the non-indifference to difference. The subjects that Merleau-Ponty are concerned with here are ones that cannot recognise the difference between individuals within community. These subjects use the identity of the individual to shut down their perception of cultural differences. Levinas builds Merleau-Ponty’s account only from sedimentation and thus accuses Merleau-Ponty of being indifferent to difference. Yet Levinas, in his own argument, is forced to lean upon the cultural when he explicates the generosity of ethics toward the other as a Western development. The affect of sedimentation is at play in the birth of the ethic that favours the alterity of the other. Levinas uses the relationship of Western culture, which he favours because it has an ethical relation, toward other cultures as an example of the ethical direction.
A reading of Levinas forces us to return to Merleau-Ponty in a new light, and what we find upon the return is a complete account of ethics and culture. Rereading Merleau-Ponty, one recognises similar key phrases and language present in Levinas. So we find the very argument of Levinas’ critique already present in Merleau-Ponty. Ultimately what makes Levinas’ critique a failed critique is his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in a temporal sense, that he interprets Merleau-Ponty as putting the subject first and the other as always in-the-world.
Bibliography
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990
Davis, C. Levinas: An Introduction, Polity, 1996
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002
Levin, David M. “Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6, 1997, pp. 345-92
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987
Levinas, E. “The Face” in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillippe Nemo, Richard A. Cohen (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1985, pp 85-92
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990
Levinas, E. “Preface” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969
Merleau-Ponty, M. “Dialogue and Perception of the Other” in Prose of the World, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, A. Lingis (trans), Northwestern University Press, 1968
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964
Sanders, M. “From Time to the Flesh: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty”, Philosophy Today, 43, 1999, pp 146-53
End Notes
The ‘ethical relation’ is the phrase used by Levinas to describe the precultural relationship the subject has with the other. I will detail what this phrase means and its relationship to intersubjectivity later in the essay, but for now it is to be understood as Levinas’ account of the subject/other relation.
The phenomenological reduction that Merleau-Ponty examines in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” is that of Nature and Mind. Merleau-Ponty credits Husserl’s paper “Ideen II” with the opening up of a phenomenological project beginning with the hypothetical reduction to the ‘solipsist’ position and a relationship to the sensible. The reduction moves to one side and out of concern all empirical data, which results for Husserl in being left with a transcendental Ego from which he begins a phenomenological project.
The sovereign subject is a subject that imposes their own subjectivity onto the realm of mutual knowledge. What I will try to show is that Levinas is making the point that mutual knowledge cannot be the starting point for intersubjective relations because each subject has to at first acknowledge that mutual knowledge through their own subjectivity. This drives Levinas into abandoning knowledge altogether as a starting point and proposes ethics.
I will explain Merleau-Ponty’s term sedimentation later in the essay.
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-3. Levinas begins to explain the ‘ethical relation’ and his project of showing the basis of human relation is not knowledge but has its first movement beyond the world.
Ibid.
Levinas, E. “Preface” & “Dwelling” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 98
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 166
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 98
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 63
The movement of the body through the world, and how the world responds to such movement.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 168
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 99
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 62
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 88
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Ibid. 168
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 81-3
Ibid. 83
Intercorporeality is foremost a dominant feature of Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. It is consistently covered by Merleau-Ponty from “The Philosopher and His Shadow” right through to his last work “The Visible and Invisible”. It is a key feature of how he explains the relationship to the other and how the subject is situated in the world. Very much has been written on this issue, and I cannot do it complete justice in this essay alone and answer the question presented for this essay. So for my purposes I will present here in so far as it is integral for my argument that Merleau-Ponty substantiates a perception that is ambiguous and is held both culturally and ethically.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 166
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 167
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101
Ibid.
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 64
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-2
Levinas uses this phrase in his paper “On Subjectivity” on page 102. It is his first indirect reference in this paper to what he refers to commonly as the infinity of the other. Levinas italicises the term as such; radical separation.
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-2
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 91
Levinas, E. “Preface” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969. Pg 26-7
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 72
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 102-4
Ibid. pg 107
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 95
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 98
Ibid. pg 96
Ibid. pg 97
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 98
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 75
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 98
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg 135
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 136
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 137
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Psychological Rigidity is a term used by Merleau-Ponty to describe subjects that deny the ambiguity of perception in the psychological realm by relying on ambivalence. Such subjects form dichotomies of understanding and do not correlate conflicting statements or sentiment upon the same object. Merleau-Ponty looks closely at these subjects as a means to examine the nature of perception, which he argues as profoundly and primordially ambiguous, and when even denied as such continues to drive the subject's perception.
Ibid. pg 100-8
Ibid. pg 107-8
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pg 182
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 101
Ibid.
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pg 176
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Ibid.
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 78-9
Ibid.
In the paper “The Philosopher and His Shadow” Merleau-Ponty examines the phenomenological reduction of Husserl and in doing so he puts forward the foundations of his own account of intersubjectivity, which is later expounded in his major work Phenomenology of Perception. Firstly, Levinas argues in “Meaning and Sense” that Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity is problematic, in that Merleau-Ponty’s subject subsumes the other’s alterity, and so Merleau-Ponty’s subject is sovereign . I will explain why Levinas uses his own interpretation, that Merleau-Ponty’s subject’s own subjectivity is imposed over mutual knowledge, as a wedge with which to critique Merleau-Ponty. Secondly Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty’s ontological account does not explain the subject’s initial orientation toward the other, and that this is problematic because it implies that there is an initiator of relations that leaves Merleau-Ponty’s account incomplete. Levinas proposes in its place an account of intersubjectivity that does not rely on mutual knowledge by expounding the ethical relation – an account of the orientation of the subject toward the other, prior to knowledge.
In this essay, I will attempt to show that Merleau-Ponty already essentially contains the ethical relation as understood by Levinas, in that he presents intersubjectivity as an ambiguity that is both ethical and cultural. Here I will begin with an analysis of why Levinas breaks away from the ontological tradition. Examining in some detail three focuses of Levinas’ critique; the body, the sovereign subject, and ‘sedimentation’ .
Phenomenology has traditionally been studied in an ontological form, from Husserl through to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It is this form of the ontological that Levinas attempts to break from, and in so doing create a new vocabulary for phenomenology. Levinas is critical of (the traditional phenomenological form of) ontological study because of its reliance on the assumption that categories of knowledge exist previous to and inform relations with others. For Levinas, this is unacceptable; thus, he gives up the ontological approach to phenomenology in favour of his own claim, that the relation between the subject and other exists prior to knowledge. This is the crux of Levinas’ objection to Merleau-Ponty – that his ontologically founded approach destroys the alterity of the other because it forgets or covers over the fact that the other cannot be reduced to the same.
I will firstly begin with the critique of the body that Levinas puts forward, and how he finds Merleau-Ponty’s definition of the body unsuitable for his project. For Merleau-Ponty begins with the body; the body is the subject. The first problem for Levinas then is to determine the manner in which Merleau-Ponty constructs the body as subject. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is already constituted with a structure of understanding of what is being experienced; the body as a home for perception is perceiving in categories of knowledge. He points out that the body is “meshed into the visible world” and is yet aware of its reference to those things in the world. Levinas remarks that Merleau-Ponty only mentions an in-between (the subject and the world) which is not constructed from categories of knowledge, this is where Levinas intends to begin. The body that Merleau-Ponty constructs is not reduced to a condition that Levinas is satisfied to begin his project with. Levinas does not want this body that is already filled with understanding, and a frame of reference on the world, because such a body would, according to Levinas, seek to understand the other - and to do so would be to limit and destroy the other’s alterity. For understanding is a process in which the foreign is made the same in the subject’s totality. Levinas wants to avoid the Hegelian dialectic of subsumation of the other by the subject because, as he claims, the uniqueness of the other would be lost. But Merleau-Ponty does not restate such a dialectic, contrary to Levinas’ claims; rather he pursues an understanding of space through the motility (and intentionality) of the body. Merleau-Ponty prescribes signification on the interaction between the body and the world, whereby meaning is induced by how the subject uses the world and is affected in turn by the world. It is through this motility that Merleau-Ponty makes the connection between interiority and exteriority and ascertains that the other is in the world of the subject. Levinas is critical of Merleau-Ponty grounding the relationship between subject and other in the same world. He insists that Merleau-Ponty does rely on shared knowledge, which is actually a construct of the subject. So Levinas is critical of the body that Merleau-Ponty proposes because of its built-in functions of understanding that allow it a dominating role in the relationship it has with the other. Levinas focuses his account of subjectivity on the space between the subject and the world, and this is where he posits his subject, void of any framework of understanding.
Now I turn to the problem of the sovereign subject that Levinas raises in Merleau-Ponty’s intentionality. The intentionality that is bound to the subject’s motility is not subjectivity but, Merleau-Ponty claims, is affected by the world. Despite this Levinas argues that such intentionality creates a sway of sovereign power held by the subject over the other. Although shaped by the world, of which the other is a part, intentionality forms a framework for motility and is thus thrown back onto the world (and so onto the other, who is in the world). Levinas contends that via motility the subject presupposes the condition and prepares itself to meet the other by creating an alter-ego – hypothetical other – based on subjectivity. The alter-ego is a structure that allows the subject to relate to the other via similarities. The other will either live up to or disappoint these similarities. Regardless the subject is sovereign in the sense that the process of relation had been chosen by the subject. Whatever is in the world to be perceived must conform to the process of relation by the subject in order to be interpreted. The key point for Levinas is that the alterity of the other, the essential disruption, cannot be accounted for in any structure unless it has already been perceived. In which case the subject’s motility is not the first orientation to the other. Yet Merleau-Ponty presents the affectation of the world upon the subject as an opening up of the body and argues that the other is also met in these terms. If the alterity of the other is genuinely met in this opening of the body to the world, and the world to the body, then it should be reflected in the subject’s motility. Setting up the other between the world and the subject allows Levinas to avoid having motility reflect the alterity of the other. Alternatively Levinas does not require motility to explain the relationship to the other because the relationship is not occurring meshed in the world.
Finally, before turning directly to Merleau-Ponty, an examination of sedimentation will strengthen Levinas. Merleau-Ponty’s construction of meaning between the body and the world is derived from the lateral differences between them. The motility of the body opens it to being affected by the world, and the body has intentionality that effects the world. Merleau-Ponty calls the building up of meaning, via signification, sedimentation. The subject casts an intention over a object in the world by acting on it, and the action itself is shaped by the physicality of the object; signification takes the form of Culture, the world takes on the signification of motility and reciprocates. Having established this reciprocity Merleau-Ponty seeks to replicate a similar reciprocity between the body of the subject and the body of the other. Both bodies are affecting and effecting sedimentation and they share the same perceptual field as a background for the objects they perceive in the world. Perception is ambiguous, according to Merleau-Ponty, and in order to distinguish between things being perceived they need to stand out from something. The sedimentation of the subject serves as the background of the world from which perception is able to take place; sedimentation creates the context and contrast from which objects in the world can be foregrounded and illuminated from the rest of the world. Levinas finds fault in the signification the subject applies to the perceived world. Levinas argues that sedimentation cannot be the first relation because the subject signifies over and above the perceived world. The significations of the subject become more meaningful than mere perception, and of another order than that which is perceived. What Levinas is pointing to is that the alterity that the other is giving over is not of the same origin as sedimentation.
Using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeality I will argue that Merleau-Ponty successfully posits perception as ambiguous despite Levinas criticisms. Intercorporeality, the subject and other belonging to the same meta-body, is Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to show the origins of cultural signification as the same as the gift of the other. The issue of intercorporeality, and especially Merleau-Ponty’s example of hands touching, is complex and warrants a hefty examination, yet for the sake of space I will use it only to illustrate the point of ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty is able to establish the perception as blurred between, the body as an object (that is perceived), and the body as a subject (that perceives). The distinction between what is touching and what is being touched does not exist; this is what the double touching demonstrates. The subject touches the left hand with the right, and in doing so feels the touch and the touching the left hand, and vice versa - a bodily reflection. The reflection results in confusion between the touched and the touching. So, in this case, Merleau-Ponty destroys the distinction between subject and object.
If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body, it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body’s operations, the terminus its exploration ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body.
The lack of distinction implies for Merleau-Ponty the sameness of “fabric”, which draws out the metaphor that the subject and other belong to a similar body, an intercorporeality, like two hands. Levinas points out that the difficulty of intercorporeality lies in the fact that it is an affirmation of a shared knowledge of things in the world. Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of the subject and other as two hands implies that each has knowledge of their part in the whole, and receives direction from that whole. What Levinas is highlighting is that Merleau-Ponty’s subject dominates shared knowledge, and so it is always the subject that ultimately totalises the difference of the other within understanding. For example Levinas claims that Merleau-Ponty’s account of sentiment remains based in knowledge because it relies on a system of values in order to be interpreted. For Levinas, a system of values must be understood by the subject previous to a relationship with the other. The values are possessed by the subject, perceived and understood by the subject alone and are not transferable to the other. Levinas claims that the handshake is not a vehicle for sentiment, but is sentiment itself. In doing so he removes any need for a system of values in order to interpret the sentiment that is being passed between the subject and the other. The sentiment is not being passed in the motility of the handshake, instead the sentiment is being actualised in motility and does not need to be mediated nor categorised.
Levinas is drawing out a different mode of relation to that of Merleau-Ponty. Instead of drawing a bodily connection in the touching Levinas argues that the relation is made by a ‘radical separation’ between the two bodies. So for Levinas there is no mediating intercorporeal connection between the two bodies and no system of mutual knowledge. What is left are two unmediated bodies, constructed without understanding of the world they perceive, and without intercorporeality. From here, Levinas proposes a starting point outside of history, because history implies that the other is already a part of the same. He develops the subject’s relation toward an absolute and unknowable infinity that is ethical, because ethics is aside and apart from history. The relationship between the subject and other is now an ethical relation - an insatiatable desire to experience the other’s unknown alterity in a way that is unmediated and hospitable, completely without the totalising effects of understanding nor the assumptions of mutual knowledge.
The ethical relation allows Levinas to construct an account of intersubjectivity without ontology. In doing so he incorporates the subject’s orientation toward the other as a desire not to own the alterity of the other but to experience this foreign alterity. For the ethical relation insists that morality, not history, is the first signification. The ethical relation is primordial but continually refreshed and recurring throughout relations with the other, existing previous to thought, decision making, and knowledge. The desire to experience the alterity (otherness) of the other without understanding it, avoids the destruction of the alterity that Levinas argues is present in Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality. Desire can be understood in terms of opposition to need, where need is the consumption of something other than self for enjoyment resulting in fulfilment (e.g. eating) which can be satiated. Whereas desire is insatiatable and is not for the consumption of the something other but to be in the presence of the other’s alterity. The orientation of the subject to the other, for Levinas, is ethical in the responsibility the subject feels for the preservation of the alterity that the subject desires.
Levinas uses the metaphor of the face – le visage – in order to explain the nature of the ethical relation. The face is an appearance of the other that signifies without context and perfectly, but is also the single reason for the expression of the subject. The signification of the other stands alone, it has no schema attached to it and is not related to any body of knowledge. For the other does not occupy the world, its infinity breaks the ego of the subject in an unrelenting movement toward the subject. The face is an overwhelming apparition that completely smothers the totality of self held by the subject, but it does not destroy that totality; rather it speaks, and it is the act of speech that makes the subject question itself. This is the first signification that Levinas puts forward in contrast to the cultural signification he critiques in Merleau-Ponty. There exists no measures of judgment because a sense of morality is required in order to make judgement. The other is the first gesture of morality and in the very face of the other is an infinity, a nothing. There is nothing that can say more, that can express an infinity larger, than the one expressed by the face; the face gives more than it ever receives. The infinity presented to the subject places a responsibility upon the subject to respond. In the subject’s questioning of its own ego it is made aware of this responsibility. It is the subject’s arrival to its own sense of responsibility that makes this relationship inherently moral. There is not a set of processes or announcements in orientation, rather the orientation is the first moment of urgent self-questioning. There is a sense in Being brought up by the force of speech flowing only to the subject from the other. The flow coming from the other cannot be constrained with knowledge or culture as it is with Merleau-Ponty, nor can it be linear, for the saying is direct and contentless, it is epiphany alone. The ethical relation precedes all cultural relations and allows Levinas to explain why in the first instance the subject is oriented toward the other; why the relationship exists at all.
Let me now argue that in two separate modes Merleau-Ponty incorporates the ethical relation into intercorporeality. Firstly as the body of the subject that exists for the other and not for the self. This is the extroceptive body that is examined in “The Child’s Relations with Others” – the body of the subject exists for-others before the subject is knowledgeable of their own body. It cannot be wholly perceived by the subject at any stage; like a camera lens it cannot capture itself. Merleau-Ponty argues that the existence of the body as a perceivable object in the world is a primordial orientation toward others and that without a concrete perception of one’s own body there can be no clear separation between the subject and the other. Furthermore the mirror phase never completes a concrete perception of the subject’s body for-others. A specular image is created whereby the subject comes to recognise that their body exists for-others, one that has been and continues to be an expression for-others. The specular image represents the subject’s own infinity back toward them and as such creates an alienation. The subject lives with this alienation by idealising the specular image in the mirror in vanity, for there is no constant nor overbearing control that the subject’s consciousness may have over the body-for-others. Here Merleau-Ponty has a relationship with others that is not consciousness nor sedimentation. The alienation Merleau-Ponty describes with the specular image is a representation of the (greater) alienation that occurs with the other. The alienation experienced by the subject in relation to the other is similar to the radical separation that Levinas uses as a basis for the ethical relation. Consequently in the mirror phase Merleau-Ponty examines the alterity of the other and its effect on the subject via the subject’s reflexive grasping of the image of its own alterity. The specular image does not destroy the subject as the felt but throws the formation of self as feeling into question. Prior to the specular image the child’s sense is not limited to the body but feels for-others; the specular image throws a singularity, the body, into the feeling for-others. So Merleau-Ponty accounts for the subject/other relationship on both cultural and ethical grounds. There exists for Merleau-Ponty no processes in the sense that there is not a lineation of one event after another and so there is no precultural account.
Secondly Merleau-Ponty argues that the subject/other relation is fundamentally ambiguous and blurred. That the relation is simultaneously oriented ethically and culturally, so that the subject relates with the other in both modes. In Merleau-Ponty’s examination of ‘psychological rigidity’ he develops an ethics from the subject’s choice of self value in the body for-itself over the in-itself. There exists both a relation to the other that is ethical and a relation that is cultural. The two relations are to be understood as inseparable and working as perception simultaneously, in complete delineation. Merleau-Ponty stresses the point of understanding these two relations together.
What must be understood, moreover, is that the question of a causal sequence of the two phenomena is meaningless. For it to be meaningful would require that the two phenomena be capable of standing in isolation. But this is never the case.
Perception is ambiguous at its very first in the body’s orientation. At once it views the other in the world, culturally enmeshed, while also viewing the other in-between the subject and the world, appearing alone as an alterity that alienates. Speech highlights the ambiguity of perception in its two fundamental presuppositions, which are firstly, that speech requires shared gestures to form a background to communication, that it is built up by sedimentation and secondly, that speech is fundamentally animated outside of culture by the disorientation, the will to communicate, that is caused by the alterity of the other. There are subjects who are in denial of perceptual ambiguity and thus rely on an ambivalence of attitude. However, underneath an ambivalent attitude (which Merleau-Ponty calls a mask) perception is still ambiguous - as such the denial of the ambiguity of perception is a denial of how the world affects the subject and how the alterity of the other affects the subject , and both are indifferences to difference. Merleau-Ponty outlines the concept of ‘rigid liberalism’ (a unique sub-type of psychological rigidity) which he uses to explain the importance of difference, a point that Levinas raises as the non-indifference to difference. The subjects that Merleau-Ponty are concerned with here are ones that cannot recognise the difference between individuals within community. These subjects use the identity of the individual to shut down their perception of cultural differences. Levinas builds Merleau-Ponty’s account only from sedimentation and thus accuses Merleau-Ponty of being indifferent to difference. Yet Levinas, in his own argument, is forced to lean upon the cultural when he explicates the generosity of ethics toward the other as a Western development. The affect of sedimentation is at play in the birth of the ethic that favours the alterity of the other. Levinas uses the relationship of Western culture, which he favours because it has an ethical relation, toward other cultures as an example of the ethical direction.
A reading of Levinas forces us to return to Merleau-Ponty in a new light, and what we find upon the return is a complete account of ethics and culture. Rereading Merleau-Ponty, one recognises similar key phrases and language present in Levinas. So we find the very argument of Levinas’ critique already present in Merleau-Ponty. Ultimately what makes Levinas’ critique a failed critique is his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in a temporal sense, that he interprets Merleau-Ponty as putting the subject first and the other as always in-the-world.
Bibliography
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990
Davis, C. Levinas: An Introduction, Polity, 1996
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002
Levin, David M. “Tracework: Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6, 1997, pp. 345-92
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987
Levinas, E. “The Face” in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillippe Nemo, Richard A. Cohen (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1985, pp 85-92
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990
Levinas, E. “Preface” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969
Merleau-Ponty, M. “Dialogue and Perception of the Other” in Prose of the World, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, A. Lingis (trans), Northwestern University Press, 1968
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964
Sanders, M. “From Time to the Flesh: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty”, Philosophy Today, 43, 1999, pp 146-53
End Notes
The ‘ethical relation’ is the phrase used by Levinas to describe the precultural relationship the subject has with the other. I will detail what this phrase means and its relationship to intersubjectivity later in the essay, but for now it is to be understood as Levinas’ account of the subject/other relation.
The phenomenological reduction that Merleau-Ponty examines in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” is that of Nature and Mind. Merleau-Ponty credits Husserl’s paper “Ideen II” with the opening up of a phenomenological project beginning with the hypothetical reduction to the ‘solipsist’ position and a relationship to the sensible. The reduction moves to one side and out of concern all empirical data, which results for Husserl in being left with a transcendental Ego from which he begins a phenomenological project.
The sovereign subject is a subject that imposes their own subjectivity onto the realm of mutual knowledge. What I will try to show is that Levinas is making the point that mutual knowledge cannot be the starting point for intersubjective relations because each subject has to at first acknowledge that mutual knowledge through their own subjectivity. This drives Levinas into abandoning knowledge altogether as a starting point and proposes ethics.
I will explain Merleau-Ponty’s term sedimentation later in the essay.
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-3. Levinas begins to explain the ‘ethical relation’ and his project of showing the basis of human relation is not knowledge but has its first movement beyond the world.
Ibid.
Levinas, E. “Preface” & “Dwelling” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 98
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 166
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 98
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 63
The movement of the body through the world, and how the world responds to such movement.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 168
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 99
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 62
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 88
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 167
Ibid. 168
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 81-3
Ibid. 83
Intercorporeality is foremost a dominant feature of Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity. It is consistently covered by Merleau-Ponty from “The Philosopher and His Shadow” right through to his last work “The Visible and Invisible”. It is a key feature of how he explains the relationship to the other and how the subject is situated in the world. Very much has been written on this issue, and I cannot do it complete justice in this essay alone and answer the question presented for this essay. So for my purposes I will present here in so far as it is integral for my argument that Merleau-Ponty substantiates a perception that is ambiguous and is held both culturally and ethically.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Philosopher and His Shadow” in Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1964 pg. 166
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 167
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101
Ibid.
Levinas, E. “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 64
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-2
Levinas uses this phrase in his paper “On Subjectivity” on page 102. It is his first indirect reference in this paper to what he refers to commonly as the infinity of the other. Levinas italicises the term as such; radical separation.
Levinas, E. “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” in Outside the Subject, Micheal B. Smith (trans), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pg 101-2
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 91
Levinas, E. “Preface” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, A. Lingus (trans), Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969. Pg 26-7
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 72
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 102-4
Ibid. pg 107
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 95
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 98
Ibid. pg 96
Ibid. pg 97
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 98
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 75
Levinas, E. “Meaning and Sense” in Collected Philosophical Papers, A. Lingis (trans). Drodecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pg 98
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg 135
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 136
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. pg 137
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Psychological Rigidity is a term used by Merleau-Ponty to describe subjects that deny the ambiguity of perception in the psychological realm by relying on ambivalence. Such subjects form dichotomies of understanding and do not correlate conflicting statements or sentiment upon the same object. Merleau-Ponty looks closely at these subjects as a means to examine the nature of perception, which he argues as profoundly and primordially ambiguous, and when even denied as such continues to drive the subject's perception.
Ibid. pg 100-8
Ibid. pg 107-8
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pg 182
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 101
Ibid.
Diprose, R. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pg 176
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Merleau-Ponty, M. “The Child’s Relation with Others”, in The Primacy of Perception, William Cobb (trans), James Edie (ed), Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. pg 106
Ibid.
Bernasconi, R. “One Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonisation and its Ethics” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Johnson, G.A. & Smith, M.B. (Eds), Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1990. Pg 78-9
Ibid.
Labels: essay, intersubjectivity, levinas, merleau-ponty, philosophy, ros
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