Merleau-Ponty and the existential conception of science

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is best known as a philosopher of science for his detailed investigations of psychology. Perhaps because of this, the significance of his work for a broader philosophical reflection on science has been overlooked. But Merleau-Ponty intended his work as a general investigation of the epistemological and ontological status of meaning and structure. The structures discovered through research in solid-state physics or molecular biology must be included within the scope of his inquiry as much as the more primary perceptual structures of color or visual depth. It is true that he often insists that science cannot account for or understand a particular phenomenon, and goes on to contrast his phenomenological discoveries with the inadequate analyses produced by science. But when Merleau-Ponty speaks of 'science' in this way, he uses the term interchangeably with 'objective thought'. The task remains to show that scientific investigation can also be freed from the traditional prejudices of objective thought, and exhibited as a mode of human existence. Merleau-Ponty himself is admittedly ambivalent about this possibility, and he rarely thematizes scientific research in the course of his investigations. The aim of this paper, however, is to develop an existential conception of science within the context of Merleau-Ponty's work. It seems clear to me that his project cannot be completed unless it incorporates science, and not just the body and the perceived world, poetry and history, painting and love. Already in La Structure du Comportement, Merleau-Ponty insists that the concept of 'structure' or 'form' employed by the Gestalt psy chologists must be extended to the physical sciences as well.