On the Poetic and the True

Abstract

Two of the working titles Merleau-Ponty had considered for The Visible and the Invisible were Genealogy of the True and The Origin of Truth. As well as offering us a genealogical critique of any reduction of truth to a single absolute origin, his philosophy also strongly contests against giving in to notions of skepticism, Pyrrhonism, deception, and illusion. He contests equally against notions of “eternal truth” based upon forgetting the “retrograde movement of truth,” which means forgetting that thought and events happen at certain moments in time and are part of a process of movement and duration. There were two moments when the questions of truth were at the forefront of Merleau-Ponty’s attention: the first concerns clarifying the “mystery of language” in both literary and mathematical expression while the second introduces us to a new idea of truth (light) and new vocabulary of truth: shining (éclatement), “pregnancy,” the “dehiscence” of Being. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is not interested in tests for the mere truth of statements as secondary language, rather he is interested in originary speech and writing, both philosophical and literary, that expresses a more “militant truth,” marked by its nobility, mobility, subtlety, suppleness, depth, and richness.