The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology Book

So then what exactly is ontology? - the study of being? and what's that, just whatever is? To some this might seem like the height of obscurantism; here we have a concept that includes everything and nothing in particular, a fancy way of saying something trivial.

Yet within the context of western philosophy I think it's possible to assign a non-trivial meaning to ontology. Starting with Descartes, philosophy became much more subjective; the question shifted from what there is to what we can know. Kant would then greatly exacerbate this tendency. Being itself is sequestered in a noumenal realm about which we can know nothing except that it is. Instead philosophy will study the subject, which is to say the categories and organizing frameworks of the mind.

At first blush phenomenology appears very much in line with this tendency. Husserl's opening move was the reduction, a form of doubt more radical than Descartes's. With the reduction, Husserl aimed to rigorously suspend all reference to the world in order to attend exclusively to the phenomena of consciousness. Known for his incredible intellect and work ethic, Husserl would labor tirelessly for decades on his reduction, but found doubting the world to be far more difficult than Descartes had ever imagined. Per Merleau-Ponty, the ultimate lesson of the reduction is that it's never fully possible. Even as purely philosophical exercise, the world can't be denied. So it seems this most extreme form of asceticism ultimately leads back to the fullness of being.

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Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is surely one of the great books of philosophy from the past hundred years. Most definitely his masterpiece, yet the near the end of his life he'd apparently grown dissatisfied with it and was working on a major revision of his thought. He would suffer a stroke at age 53 and die before finishing it.

Renaud Barbaras's book belongs to a sub-genre of secondary literature which aims to reconstruct and complete MP's late philosophy. See also Maurice Merleau Ponty: Between Phenomenology And Structuralism and Merleau-Ponty's Ontology. For these books the definitive text is the Visible and the Invisible. This was going to be MP's new opus, in which he'd leave behind the framework of Phenomenology of Perception. From a reflective philosophy that still depended on an outmoded notion of the subject to a radical ontology of the flesh. In a typical sentence Barbaras writes that "Merleau-Ponty [was] led to reject the dualities of reflective philosophy still at work in Phenomenology of perception and top open the way for an ontological questioning" (pp 235)

While of course I agree that MP's untimely death was a tragic loss for philosophy, I can't accept this narrative whole-heartedly. When I read the Visible and the Invisible what struck me was how fragmentary and thin it is. Really no more than a few essays on other philosophers and working notes. In the decade and half he lived after finishing Phenomenology of Perception, MP struggled mightily with all his philosophical projects. Even if he'd lived another thirty years there's no guarantee that he would ever have finished the Visible and the Invisible. Moreover, where Barbaras and others have envisioned this book would amount to a renunciation of his earlier work and maybe phenomenology itself, I don't see that as warranted. Take for instance MP's philosophy of expression. Where Barbaras presents this as the key to his new philosophy, actually the most sustained discussion of expression in MP's work can be found in Phenomenology of Perception.

Against later trends of structuralism which would dissolve the subject in a would-be science of signs, Merleau-Ponty always held out a space for subjectivity in his philosophy. In my view this is very much to his credit. The imperative to be radical shouldn't overtake all other considerations. To the end MP maintained an admirable humility and fidelity to experience.