Merleau-Ponty and Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

In this essay I will respond to a number of issues raised by Steven Crowell’s excellent essay “The Project of Ultimate Grounding and the Appeal to Intersubjectivity in Recent Transcendental Philosophy.” I will do so by using Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Crowell makes a useful distinction “between two important versions of transcendental philosophy—the neoKantian version oriented toward justification of principles and the phenomenological version oriented toward clarification of meaning” (Crowell 31). Using Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, I will support the latter (with some qualification) and criticize the former: the only way to ground knowledge about experience is to use experience itself, and, even though proponents of the first version have moved away from Kant’s belief in an isolated rational transcendental subject, by way of the so-called “linguistic turn,” I will argue that they still untenably seek a priori conditions that are necessary for the possibility of any rational discourse. I will argue that they untenably seek to ground our knowledge of experience by appealing to something outside it. They may begin with experience (as Kant did), but they move toward the transcendental conditions of experience (at least toward a priori linguistic conditions, if not Kant’s logical schemata) that make experience possible. For experience to be meaningful, this position claims, it must be framed by language. While Merleau-Ponty likewise argues that experience is framed by language, it is by a language that is a sublimation of the experience itself, not by the supposedly “ultimate” conditions that make experience and the discussion of it possible. For the neo-Kantians, this language transcends experience, rather than sublimates it, as I will argue below. I will also argue against Crowell’s use of Levinas’s ethical sentiment (and for Merleau-Ponty’s mixture of sentiment with a more primary sentience) to ground rational discourse. I will begin with a brief exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as it relates to these issues and will then proceed to specifically address the issues as they are raised by Crowell in his essay. In his Phenomenology of Perception, when addressing the nature of the subject of experience, including the untenable nature of a transcendental ego, Merleau-Ponty says, “the subject of sensation is neither a thinker who takes note of a quality, nor an inert setting which is affected or changed by it, it is a power which is born into, and simultaneously with, a certain existential environment, or is synchronized with it.” The subject of sensation is not an abstract intellectual consciousness or an inert setting but an embodied existential subject, an embodied subject that is already and always a part of the world upon which it opens. For rationalism, with its move toward the transcendental rational conditions of experience, sensations become thought about intellectually identified sensations, sensations that are intellectually identified in a whole series of perspectives. Yet if the objects of perception become the abstract conceptual representations of the mind (or merely linguistic expressions), then it is impossible to say “that I see with my eyes or hear with my ears,” since they also become objects of reflection (or merely expressions of language) with no subjective side. (Karl-Otto Apel, whom Crowell rightfully cites as a representative of those who argue for a linguistic/pragmatic a priori, tends to separate the transcendental and the empirical, tends to separate the transcendental conditions for the expression of language from the speaking subjects, as we shall see below.) What we must do, then, is explain or trace the move from the pre-reflectively lived-through perception to the expressions of conceptually (and thus