Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World , livre ebook

Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World
Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World
Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology
Glen A. Mazis
Front cover: “Norham, Castle, Sunrise,” c. 1845, Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851. Permission granted ©Tate, London 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mazis, Glen A., 1951– author.
Title: Merleau-Ponty and the face of the world : silence, ethics, imagination, and poetic ontology / Glen A. Mazis.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005986 (print) | LCCN 2016029477 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438462318 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438462301 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438462325 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961.
Classification: LCC B2430.M3764 M39 2016 (print) | LCC B2430.M3764 (ebook) | DDC 194—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016005986
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Wilshire, mountain man, philosopher extraordinaire, and dear friend, and to Donna Wilshire, wild woman of the earth spirit, philosopher, and also my dear friend.
Contents
Preface: From Silence to Depth
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty
Introduction: Merleau-Ponty’s Warning of an “Endless Nightmare” P ART I E NTERING THE W ORLD OF E XPRESSIVE S ILENCE I. Hearkening to Silence: Merleau-Ponty beyond Postmodernism II. Language as a Power for Error and Violence III. A Different Silence and the World’s Gesture IV. Silence, the Depth of the Flesh and Its Movement V. Silence Sings as We Do When Happy: Charged Evanescence VI. Language Can Live Only from its Roots in Silence VII. Indirect Expression as Silence Entering Language VIII. Silence, Duration, and Vertical Time IX. Silence Arrives at the First Day P ART II F ACES OF THE W ORLD —D ESIRING S ENSIBILITY AND E THICS I. Physiognomic Sense and Faces within the World II. The Face of Desire III. Merleau-Ponty’s Face of this World and Levinas’s Face of the Other World IV. Perceptual Otherness, Not Absolute Otherness V. An Ethics of Flesh: Saint-Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty, and Felt Solidarity VI. Lateral Unity versus Vertical Identity: Kinship versus Substitution VII. The Ethical Alterity of Depth of this World Rather than Absolute Height P ART III T HE I MAGINAL , O NEIRIC M ATERIALITY, AND P OETIC L ANGUAGE I. Early Implied Physiognomic Imagination II. Sketches of the Imaginal in Myth, Film, and Children III. Imaginal of Institution, Sensible Ideas, and Proustian Sensitivity IV. Later Writings: Toward an Imaginal Ontology V. Bachelard’s Material Imagination and Flesh of the World VI. Toward a Poetic Ontology VII. A Poetics of Philosophy
Conclusion: Sense and Solidarity at the Depths of World
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Preface
From Silence to Depth
Like most aspects of thought that relate to the work of Merleau-Ponty, the two main inspirations for this book are interwoven. The first is that we are living through a time that could desperately use the insights of Merleau-Ponty’s work, since we witness almost daily a destructive inability to connect with others within our cultures and across cultures at a historical juncture that requires greater cooperation. This inability is recognized vaguely to be a result of identifying incorrectly that we are isolated individuals. We can’t see how we are part of communities, both local and global, and how even the various parts of our psyches can connect. This uneasy feeling is somehow related to an equal inability to bring nature, culture, history, economics, and technology into a fruitful interconnection, which allows them to remain as colliding forces whose oppositions undermine the quality of life. These were issues that also plagued Merleau-Ponty, but his approach to finding a new way of articulating an ontology, an epistemology—and as I will contend in this book—an ethics is one that is still not fully understood by many scholars and certainly not by the global culture. Merleau-Ponty’s unique approach to embodiment would offer the contemporary world an understanding of the interconnectedness of self, others, and the world that still incorporates an appreciation of difference that could be vital for discerning more clearly the puzzles of postmodern existence causing global harm.
For Merleau-Ponty, his emphasis on embodiment was not merely a matter of giving the body a more central role in calculating innovative practices; his project was to fathom the body’s ways of apprehending reality in ways that made our more rational and traditional understandings possible. His work articulates how self, others and world are manifest in a radically different way when seen through embodiment’s hold on reality. His philosophy could be a fruitful way of addressing the contemporary widespread interest in giving the body a more central role in thought and practice. Be it in medicine, psychology, popular culture, or academic disciplines, an emphasis on the role of the body as portent of new meaning and fulfillment is gaining force. Yet, for all this new attention—or even, as one might be tempted to call it, obsession—the radical shift that a greater comprehension of embodiment’s sensitive role in understanding self, world, and others in a liberating way is just as distant as in the earlier historical periods when the dismissing and despising of the body seemed more the general rule. The body is still being objectified. As a result, the particular way in which embodiment’s relations with self, others, and the world yields a very different epistemology, ontology, and ethics is yet to be realized.
This leads to the second inspiration for this book. Given the current interest in embodiment, there is a turn to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but some of its most startling dimensions are in danger of being passed by. The emphases of this book are easily overlooked in their importance to the philosophy of embodiment. Yet, these ideas are necessary to bring the cutting edge of Merleau-Ponty’s unique ontology of the flesh into greater relief. Since there is now within philosophy and other disciplines a spreading recognition of the power of Merleau-Ponty’s sustained interrogation of the body’s differing and fundamental ways of understanding, it is time to delve more deeply into the radical nature of this understanding. There is a danger that some of its furthest edges and more subtle nuances will be lost as the major outlines of his thought become more popular. Paradoxically, as a philosophy becomes more appreciated, its most radical ideas and important divergences from the norm are often diminished—just as the rough edges of a stone are smoothed out by greater handling. This book contends that to enter more deeply into Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception and the new ontology to which perception brought him requires following a path into his thought that proceeds in four steps. The first step is to recognize that the power of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh can be fathomed only through understanding the key role of silence in his thought. Without both understanding the unique sense of silence that Merleau-Ponty articulated and then seeing how silence opens us to what Merleau-Ponty called the mute “gestures of the world,” we will not have access to the level at which person and world are co-emergent , and this is vital to his indirect ontology. Also, in fathoming Merleau-Ponty’s sense of silence and gestural interchange between person and world, one can appreciate one of the Phenomenology of Perception’s most important conclusions: that perception has demonstrated another meaning of the sense of meaning itself. This sense is further articulated in the lecture courses of the 1950s and in the final writings—the meaning inscribed by motion itself through perception. There is a give and take of silent exchange that underlies the more deliberate dialogue between us and the world that will emerge in language and reflection. The relation between this type of silence and language is not antithetical. Entering into this silence infuses these dimensions with a dynamic, dialogical import that goes beyond a human-centered ontology. Silence’s voices are also seen to be enveloping in a way that frontal expression and apprehension are not. Part of Merleau-Ponty’s fears for the future of humanity was his recognition that the dawning postmodern culture would be unable to hearken to silence. Silence will be examined as to how it allows the reversibility of humanity and the world to emerge in a felt understanding. It will be seen how the opposite is also true: namely, that only the felt sense of reversibility allows silence’s sense to enter into the perceived depths of the world.
Once this level of prereflective apprehension and dialogue is articulated, what Merleau-Ponty referred to as “the face” or “physiognomy” of the things of the world, as well as the physiognomies of other people and creatures, becomes visible and palpable in a new way. A vital and enveloping apprehension of the face of other beings occurs within a silent perceptual encounter such that gestures express a felt sense. We will explore how this sense of physiognomy or face is the opp