The notion of repression as active forgetfulness already found in Nietzsche and systematised by Freud and his successors is employed in a distinctive manner by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. By showing how we appropriate our environment towards outcomes and respond to other people, he contends, we can unearth hidden modes of operative intentionality. Two such modes are the motor intentional projection of action and the anonymous intercorporeality that includes touching and being touched. Each of these is an aspect of (...) a past that was never a present. Merleau-Ponty does have something to say about pasts that were once present and that linger on in human life. Yet he shows little interest in the unconsciousness of psychoanalysis for its own sake. Psychoanalytic accounts of repression are assimilated into his theory of the body itself, serving merely as means for illustrating the latter. I suggest that this move follows on a conception of an integrated existent whose past acquisitions are remarkably enabling and untroubling. (shrink)

Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour (...) to show that the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s explication of concrete or practical movement by way of the Schneider case could be read as ending up close to automatism, neglecting its flexibility and plasticity in the face of obstacles. It can be contended that he already goes off course in his explication of Schneider’s condition. Rasmus Jensen has argued that he assimilates a normal person’s motor intentionality to the patient’s, thereby generating a vacuity problem. I argue that Schneider’s difficulties with certain movements point to a means of (...) broadening Merleau-Ponty’s account of concrete movement, one that he broaches without exploiting. What could do more work is his recognition of a transposition capacity - and hence of a plasticity - in the healthy body’s skill schema. As well as avoiding vacuity, he could forestall the appearance of a dichotomy between practical coping and creativity. (shrink)

_The Phenomenology Reader_ is the first comprehensive anthology of seminal writings in phenomenology. Carefully selected readings chart phenomenology's most famous thinkers, such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida, as well as less well known figures such as Stein and Scheler. Ideal for introductory courses in phenomenology and continental philosophy, _The Phenomenology Reader_ provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century philosophy.

When Merleau-Ponty writes about belief in the Christian God, he does not explicate the belief phenomenologically, whilst accepting Husserl’s claim that God cannot perceive panoptically or access human consciousness fully. For the later Merleau-Ponty the Christian idea of God incarnate does not separate the absolute from existence, and God is found wherever we gather in his name and ameliorate suffering. Yet Christianity remains haunted by the threat of acosmism, or the collapse of the real world into the divinity. I respond (...) that believers are not concerned by full access to their first-person states. What is important is the way we are accessed. When we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s later conception of God, I contend that it draws on the resources of the Christian tradition it disavows and is open to a Nietzschean critique. Just as importantly it neglects the phenomenon of motivation. I suggest that William James does much to set out a first-person phenomenology of an inspirational belief in God that Merleau-Ponty neglects. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Berkeley is proto-phenomenologist. The term phenomenology will chiefly be understood in terms of the approach of Edmund Husserl. Berkeley is attentive to the correct use of significations in philosophical exposition, the subjective character of experience, the motility of the perceiver and the transcendence of things. Like the phenomenologists he rejects materialism, naturalism and scepticism. He seeks to preserve the evidences of ordinary perception, setting out an account of scientific theory that can cohere with them. (...) In the first part of this essay I go through some of the more clear-cut ways in which Berkeley anticipates Husserl and some of the latter’s successors. In the second part I lay out their criticisms of Berkeley, also indicating what they hold in common. In the third and final part I consider some of the ways in which Berkeley can meet these criticisms, either readily or through certain qualifications, and I bring out his most significant contributions as a proto-phenomenologist. My aim is to show there are more than traces of the phenomenological attitude in Berkeley. In his efforts to save the appearances, he goes back to that world in which we live and breathe, if not quite have our being. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to show that Edith Stein’s influence on Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception is predominantly through her early work On the Problem of Empathy. Though he does not give Stein due acknowledgement, Merleau-Ponty is closer to her philosophically than to her near contemporary Max Scheler, who receives much more attention. Whilst Stein’s influence is in the main difficult to disentangle from that of Husserl, some of her reformulations of and additions to the latter’s ideas are (...) taken up recognisably in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. I focus on her accounts of bodily ownership and embodied willing and acting, and on her view of how the ownness of conscious human life is a condition of explicit self-awareness and empathic experience. I conclude by showing how her contributions are developed further by Merleau-Ponty, most notably in his reworking of the representation, decision and implementation model of human action. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s muscular liberalism and pragmatic intolerance draw sustenance from Nietzsche as well as from the earlier American pragmatists. We set out the ways in which Rorty adopts and adapts their ideas. We go on to suggest that the cultural ethnocentrism that he advocates carries certain risks, and can be divorced all too easily from his own qualifications, particularly in the post-9-11 scenario. It is our contention that Isaiah Berlin’s case for a pluralist liberalism warrants serious consideration as an alternative.

A rejection of the notion of substance, an emphasis on intraworldly experience and an incorporation of ideas from modern biology are just three of the distinctive features of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics or philosophy of organism. The last two features give his scheme a heavily naturalistic tinge, despite his positing of eternal objects or universal forms of definiteness, which - together with subjective aims or final causes - are instantiated in a divinity prior to worldly realization.1 Such a naturalism (...) might seem to preclude largely a comparison with the work of Jacques Derrida, with other differences between the two being left aside. Derrida began his career as a student of phenomenology and structuralism, and by far the greater number of his philosophical writings has been devoted to thinkers who are explicitly post-Kantian. Yet this does not mean that he is a transcendental philosopher who abandons experience and the empirical world in favour of language and consciousness. In this paper I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by systems theory and evolutionary biology - is not in fact shut off from the extra-conscious and extra-linguistic dimensions of actuality. I also suggest that his deconstructive approach is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s in rejecting essentialism, namely, the idea of fixed and determined essences that underlie accidental properties and changes. From a Derridean perspective, one might even see Whitehead’s alternative as insufficiently radical, since it seems to posit not just eternal objects and God, but a cosmology in which the most fundamental beings or “actual entities” undergo no essential changes or mutations in their respective histories. It is arguable, however, that the latter conclusion would only be consequent on a restrictive interpretation of the pathways of process possible in Whitehead’s metaphysics.. (shrink)

A major charge levelled against Derrida is that of textual idealism - he effectively closes his deconstructive approach off from the world of experience, the result being that it is incapable of being coherently applied to practical questions of ethics and politics. I argue that Derrida's writings on experience can in fact be reconstructed as an empirical realism in the Husserlian sense. I begin by outlining in very broad strokes Husserl's account of perception and his empirical realism. I then set (...) out some of the major criticisms of Derrida proffered by Dallas Willard and Peter Dews and counter them with evidence from Derrida's texts themselves. I conclude by presenting his account as a variant of Husserl's, which does not discernibly develop on or depart from the latter. Key Words: arche-writing • aspect • differance • empirical realism • horizon • middle voice • noema • representation • revisability • signification • signified • textuality • trace. (shrink)

An attempt to compare the approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Jacques Derrida might appear extremely unrewarding from the outset. Derrida has often been hailed (and reviled) as a figure who rejects many key concepts in the philosophical lexicon, amongst them those of subjectivity, rationality, creativity and progress. Whitehead, on the other hand, may seem to hold uncritically to the notion of a metaphysical system in which every element of our experience can be interpreted, so that everything of which we (...) are conscious ‘shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme’.1 In our modern world, furthermore, Whitehead argues that it is the business of philosophers and students and practical men ‘to recreate and re-enact a vision of the world...penetrated through and through with unflinching rationality’.2 In this article I wish to show that Whitehead’s understanding of philosophy converges with Derrida’s in certain significant respects, and that this clearly illustrated when we relate both of them to Edmund Husserl. I will begin with brief outlines of Derrida’s account of the philosophical tradition, of his deconstruction or delimitation of subjectivity, and of the way in which his understanding of philosophical openness is influenced by the work of Husserl. I will then proceed to show how many of the ideas found in Whitehead’s metaphysics resemble those of Derrida. Other aspects of this metaphysics would certainly be inimical to the latter, but need not be seen as fixed in stone. This is recognized by Whitehead himself, who has a fallibilistic and revisionary understanding of the philosophical enterprise that is akin to Husserl and Derrida. My conclusion, however, is that Whitehead is closer to Husserl in concentrating on the reconstructive side of philosophy, a side which Derrida has ultimately neglected. (shrink)

In this chapter I contend that Husserl’s investigations of reduction and givenness culminate in a hubris and a humility that are not precisely where Marion might look for them. In the first section of this essay I set out the main points in Marion’s reading of Husserl. I begin by outlining the broadening and breakthrough achieved in the early work, and then consider the shift that Marion sees presaged in the principle of all principles and announced in the reduction. On (...) the latter’s interpretation, appearing things are reduced to objects within the intentional immanence of consciousness. This process culminates in poor and flat phenomena that are modelled on the mathematising horizons of the subject. I go on to give a short outline of Marion’s alternative notions of the interloqué and the saturated phenomenon. I commence the second section by looking briefly at what I call Husserl’s philosophical hubris, brought out in some of his remarks concerning the subjective a priori. Hubris lies in the interpretation of everything as a meaning for me, from God through to the world. It does not lie in the taking of beings as objects within fixed horizons, for Husserl shows a notable humility towards the things themselves in their respective appearances. Such humility is not a rarity, but is threaded through the explications that follow on the procedures of epoché and reduction. In the rest of this section, my concern is to show that, as Husserl’s thought develops, he pays ever more attention to the original modes of givenness of transcendent things. In the third and final section, I suggest that he also does justice to the character of the world as non-objective ground and horizon. Philosophical hubris will in no way preclude empirical humility. (shrink)

In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens gives us an account of Mrs. Gargery going into a rage that is as remarkable for its brevity as for its insight. ‘I must remark of my sister,’ says Pip, ‘that passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages.’1 What is remarkable about this passage is its descriptive richness, (...) that way it shows how many of our emotional reactions involve something more than spontaneity in their actual performance. All this we glean readily and grasp as true from being with others; the genius of Dickens is to carry what is so close to us unto the page. I suspect that in his own wry manner, Husserl too would have liked this passage. He held out for a method of describing concrete lived phenomena that would neither underinterpret nor over-interpret. Such a description would avoid the twin and complementary sins of stripping meaning away from the appearances and putting strangeness into them. Presupposing too little is just as erroneous as too much, and Husserl was acutely aware that ‘in the apprehension of a man very much is already included.’2 When the descriptive imperative is to the fore, Husserl’s studies of the other are notable for their rejection of psychophysical dualism. But when the Cartesian exclusion of contingent certainty triumphs, he adopts a methodological dualism that decomposes the ordinary and unitary experience of the Other. The criticisms of his Cartesian derivation the Other are by now quite familiar, and I will only rehearse them where they intersect with the main theses of this paper. What I would first like to establish is that Husserl’s Cartesian approach to the Other - beginning in Logical Investigations and culminating in the derivation of the alter ego from the monadic sphere of ownness - clashes with the account of bracketing and reduction in Ideas I.. (shrink)

According to Kevin Mulligan, Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena gets the later wrong on almost every count, comprising an egregious example of a logic in the Parisian sense. In his reading Derrida seeks to undo the distinction, not just between the imagined word and the perceived word, but between imaginative and perceptual presentations in general. He also falls prey to the mentalist thesis that a subject is aware of the states he is in, a thesis not applicable (...) to speech. Derrida goes on to make a failed psychologistic attempt to display the role of death in our uses of signs, and claims that sign and meaning idealities command the totality of their actual and possible instantiations and therefore represent these, such that the resulting mixed species has the magical properties of being active and efficient. I argue that Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl is far more accurate than Mulligan allows, and that his work is only susceptible to the final objection. His text needs to be read again so as to get the greater part of it right. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty’s later work we find certain themes and conceptions that show an overlap with the theory and above all the practice of mindfulness. These include the reversibility of the flesh, the richness of things in the perceived world that draw us towards them, and the emphasis on painting as that medium that brings this world of perception to light, the ways in which we perceive it and better ways of perceiving it. In this paper I argue that many of (...) these themes are also found in his earlier work. In Phenomenology of Perception especially he characterises the essentially embodied subject as at once an essentially projective existent. It does not live in a world of proximate opportunities and threats, but is situated in the further and virtual future, or rather futures. This is due to productive imagination and the skilled and schematised body with its motor intentional schematisations of postures and perceptual fields. Yet Merleau-Ponty does not see projection in exclusively imaginative and volitional terms, that is, as the choosing of authentic and self-transformative courses of action. Many of our projects are solicited by the things themselves as determinable indeterminacies that draw us closer, not to command them, but to appreciate their singularities or perceptual styles. In his descriptions of living amongst and towards the things he proffers a kind of mindfulness that evokes much of the magic of childhood and that enjoins a more centred existence in adulthood. (shrink)

This is an advanced introduction to and original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's greatest work, Phenomenology of Perception. Timothy Mooney provides a clear and compelling exposition of the theory of our projective being in the world, and demonstrates as never before the centrality of the body schema in the theory. Thanks to the schema's motor intentionality our bodies inhabit and appropriate space: our postures and perceptual fields are organised schematically when we move to realise our projects. Thus our lived bodies are ineliminably (...) expressive in being both animated and outcome oriented through-and-through. Mooney also analyses the place of the work in the modern philosophical world, showing what Merleau-Ponty takes up from the Kantian and Phenomenological traditions and what he contributes to each. Casting a fresh light on his magnum opus, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of the body. (shrink)