Does Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology have something to supply in a time of ‘democratic, social, economic and environmental instability’? Guillaume Le Blanc, the editor of a file in Esprit 3/2025 on the twentieth-century French thinker, believes he does.
Within the philosophical custom that runs from Nietzsche to Canguilhem, it’s life that kinds the primordial topic of ontology. However life has misplaced this foundational function in modern philosophy. As a substitute, philosophers now emphasize how lives are formed by social, political and cultural forces. Somewhat than speaking about life normally, we discuss in regards to the plurality of particular person lives, every one formed by its personal set of situations.
Merleau-Ponty’s basic declare is that the physique has historically, although wrongly, been seen from a third-person perspective. As a substitute, we want a first-person account of what it’s to have a physique, and what it’s to be a centre of perspective, surrounded by the world. In different phrases, what Merleau-Ponty seeks to elucidate is the actual fact of ‘incarnation’.
How can we adapt this idea to new concepts in regards to the situations that form life? Judith Butler has just lately argued that COVID-19 revealed the best way by which our our bodies are intermixed with these of others. Our bodies are porous and permeable in a method that makes it unattainable to consider them as sovereign. As a substitute, for Butler, the essential expertise of incarnation is relationality, and ‘the world of the pandemic revealed that the borders of incarnation are only ever provisional’.
By adapting Merleau-Ponty’s thought to this new method, what emerges is an account by which completely different our bodies have completely different values, relying on how they’re acknowledged and sustained by completely different types of energy. From this angle, writes Le Blanc, being absolutely incarnated is one thing one should aspire to and work in direction of, relatively than one thing we will take with no consideration.
Eco-phenomenology
When the primary wave of environmental ethics emerged within the Seventies, it requested how our legal guidelines and moral standards must be modified to deal with ecological considerations, writes Corine Pelluchon.
This was adopted by a extra phenomenological method, with thinkers like Kohák, Evernden and Toadvine arguing that we can not see the pure world third-personally, as a set of objects or assets. Somewhat, we have now to take a first-person view: the environmental disaster is ‘a crisis in our relationship to the world’, as Pelluchon places it.
That is why Merleau-Ponty and his account of incarnation have been so precious for these thinkers. Drawing on Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt, Merleau-Ponty provides us a method of understanding how our surroundings constitutes us, relatively than merely being one thing to grasp.
However Pelluchon additionally attracts out the boundaries of this method. Eco-phenomenology has centered an excessive amount of on our connection to nature. In doing so, it hasn’t paid sufficient consideration to ‘pathological forms’: to the estrangement people can really feel from nature, or to the anxiousness that pushes us to behave towards nature and our personal pursuits.
If it may speak about this stuff, too, then Pelluchon sees phenomenology as providing the assets for a brand new political idea, one which emphasizes each ‘the sublime character of the human, our capacity to surpass ourselves, but also our destructiveness’.
Erasing Merleau-Ponty
Within the interval between his early demise in 1961 and the Nineteen Nineties, Merleau-Ponty largely fell out of sight. Even in his lifetime, he was typically seen as ‘the eternal runner-up’, significantly in relation to Sartre.
Judith Revel asks why this was. Merleau-Ponty, she argues, was erased from philosophical historical past due to his engagement with the subject of historicity. She focuses significantly on his inaugural lecture on the Collège de France, the place he presents the idea of ‘good ambiguity’. This gives the framework for all his future thought.
Good ambiguity is a place that embraces openness and rejects systematicity. It refuses any form of historic determinism and embraces ‘the complexity of the world’ and ‘the thickness of history’. With this insistence on openness, Merleau-Ponty broke together with his colleagues, and that is the place his erasure from the historical past of French philosophy started.
Fairy tales
Nicole Belmont’s analysis focuses on the formulation used to introduce fairy tales after they had been primarily an oral custom. She is especially concerned with utilizing the strategies of psychoanalysis to discover how fairy tales are created, and within the hyperlinks between such tales and crafts like weaving and stitching. In her view, such tales have turn out to be weaker as they turned predominantly written texts, as a result of ‘the child no longer has the freedom to welcome the mental images that the human voice conjures up’.
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