A Re-Introduction: Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl aux limites de la Phénoménologie and Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

Abstract

Une pensee n'est pas des idees, c'est circonscription d'un impense .... Une methode de lecture objective et de critique interne ne suffit pas. Elle masquera meme le relief de paroles qui n'ont leur sens que par 'ecart. (HLP 14-15)1 taking up Merleau-Ponty's course notes on Husserl's Origin of Geometry entitled, Husserl Aux Limites de la Phenomenologie, perhaps the first thing that stands out for the reader familiar with Jacques Derrida's seminal Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry is the fact that the concepts central to the Derridean critique, the infinite idea and the role of writing, receive little commentary at all.2 Despite sharing the view that language plays the key role in understanding how Husserl's Origin text reaches a kind of limit, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida differ on the nature of this limit in some fundamental ways; starting with where in Husserl's text this limit or unthought is located. Husserl's treatment of the origin of geometry unfolds in two separate phases; an initial phase in which he explains the transition of the geometrical ideality from the mental space of the geometer to the culture at large, and a second phase in which he argues how, as a cultural object, geometry can also become a trans-cultural, supra-temporal truth. Derrida focuses on the second phase of Husserl's argument as he views the seemingly impossible relationship between the written word and the infinite idea as the best indicator of Husserl's limits and his subsequent unthought. contrast, Merleau-- Ponty concentrates on the first phase. For him, it is language's role in the geometrical ideality's initial passage to intersubjective accord that affords the best route to Husserl's unthought. Consequently, we are left with two divergent readings of The Origin of Geometry. Derrida purports to uncover a false unity prescribed by the infinite idea that really betokens delay and difference while Merleau-Ponty claims to uncover a false separation prescribed in the passage to intersubjective accord that reveals a kind of unity. the end, along with the ontological and epistemological differences these two unthoughts yield, I will suggest there are also significant ethical implications. Language and the Genesis of Culture Merleau-Ponty's investigation of the first phase of Husserl's argument begins with the following meditation, In this original act, geometry is only a moment of personal life.. . how does this layer acquire ideality beyond the conscious space of its discoverer? By language. But how is language this power (HLP 24)?3 Husserl describes the relationship between consciousness, language, and world as providing the material for the cultural genesis of ideal objects. However, language occupies a place of privilege. As the horizon which allows for the communication of sense among different geometers, it is language which conditions the possibility of intersubjectivity, culture, and, ultimately, the phenomenological reactivation of geometry's truths. Yet, language's exact place within the phenomenological structure of intentional analysis is something Husserl is never really clear about. Given the opposition of existence (facticity) and essence (intentionality) in Husserl's method, language's central role in the genesis of culture raises the question of its causal priority. Is language an essential aspect of what it means to exist in the human community, or is participating in the greater humanity a function of the existence of language? Merleau-Ponty writes: Question: is it by the human horizon that one understands language or is it through language that one understands the human horizon? Most likely there is not an [either/or] choice. Is it that the first of these relationships [the human horizon] is according to existence? The other [language] according to essence? The first [the human horizon], for example, participating in the existential (compare Ideen II where we belong [gehoren] to the same world). …