Reading Notes and Comments on Aron Gurwitsch's The Field of Consciousness*

Abstract

Editor’s Introduction Merleau-Ponty’s research between the spring of 1959 and the autumn of 1960, the period during which he began writing The Visible and the Invisible, 1 is well revealed by his handwritten reading notes on the work of Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness. 2 The comments which accompany these reading notes are often placed between brackets, and the principal subject of these critical comments is the intellectualism of Husserlian phenomenology, insofar as it makes things into pure objects of perception, without any reality of their own. 3 If the thing is reduced to being the object of perception, what guarantees its identity (in the sense of being identifiable)? What guarantees that one is truly thinking something of that thing, and that it is not a matter of a purely nominal imputation lacking any objectivity whatsoever – that is, which would neither be based on nor refer to any thing in particular? These reading notes pose the problem of the unity of experience from the side of the object and the subject and raise a discussion of the eidetic method in a very precise manner. They sketch the possibility of an interrogation of the unity of perceptual experience such as Merleau-Ponty announces it in Eye and Mind, where no perception would be named by the thing: as speech speaks to me, the thing in its nature as worldly object – that is, as spatial unity, as body in the world, as flesh of the world – arouses my perception. These notes are in keeping with his research on a non-dualistic philosophy such as is found in The Visible and the Invisible. We have identified different levels of reading of this text. Merleau-Ponty reads Gurwitsch, who reads phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty himself. Sometimes agreeing with Gurwitsch’s criticisms of Phenomenology of Perception, 4 at other times Merleau-Ponty defends certain aspects of his philosophy criticized by Gurwitsch. These reading notes allow one to appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s critical distance with respect to certain ideas from Phenomenology of Perception with which he finds himself at odds when reading