Seeing Things

Ok, ok. I’m sure the suspense is killing you. I promised in my last post that I would reveal a surprising and amazing fact about the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, as MP understood it. And I’ve left the issue hanging for almost a week now. So here it is…

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this revelation is that it turns on the interpretation of a passage from Augustine. Augustine does not figure in any major way in either Husserl’s or Merleau-Ponty’s work. But in the Preface to PoP Merleau-Ponty, perhaps surprisingly, references a passage from Augustine’s early work De Vera Religione. The passage, in context, reads as follows: noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. in interiore homine habitat ueritas. Roughly, this translates as, “Do not wish to go outside (foras), return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.” Merleau-Ponty’s point in referring to this passage is to deny its truth. Indeed, he says, “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only the ‘inner man.’ Or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is in the world, it is within the world that he knows himself” (p. v). The point here seems to be to deny any kind of Augustinean return to the subject, on the grounds that our experience is not a purely subjective one, but is rather one that already involves us in a world. This is part and parcel of Heidegger’s denial that any kind of Cartesian subjectivity characterizes us, and is consistent with Heidegger’s idea that we are being-in-the-world, a unitary phenomenon that doesn’t distinguish between a radically subjective inner realm and a radically objective outer world towards which the subject is intentionally directed. Merleau-Ponty is using Augustine, in other words, as a foil. Augustine’s conception of the inner man is phenomenologically bereft, on Merleau-Ponty’s account.

But why choose Augustine to make this point? Augustine’s account of the inner man is not the fully developed Cartesian account of subjectivity, even if it is an ancestor of that aspect of Cartesianism. (Note: I say “Cartesianism” to avoid exegetical issues about whether Descartes himself was actually a Cartesian in this sense. Whether he was or not, he was certainly understood to be so by the tradition, and that is what matters for our purposes here.) In any case, Augustine’s view seems peculiarly abstruse. Even Heidegger, who certainly knew his Church Fathers, didn’t spend much time attacking Augustine on this issue. So the footnote to Augustine seems to stick out like a sore thumb, begging for explanation.

And boy is there an explanation. Merleau-Ponty, as it turns out, is not the only phenomenologist to refer to this passage in Augustine. Husserl cites it too. And not just anywhere: this passage occurs as the final sentence to the Cartesian Meditations, a manuscript still unpublished at the time Merleau-Ponty was writing, but one he had definitely read and which he cites regularly by name in PoP. Merleau-Ponty is not just picking a random passage from Augustine, in other words; he is picking the very passage that Husserl himself referred to in characterizing his most developed phenomenological view. For this reason it seems to me clear that MP isn’t just citing Augustine, but is citing Husserl’s treatment of Augustine as it occurs in Cartesian Meditations. He is offering an explicit invitation, in other words, subtle but undeniable, an invitation for the reader to compare his own (i.e., Merleau-Ponty’s) account of the meaning of this passage with the account that Husserl earlier gave. By seeing how each philosopher situates himself with respect to Augustine, we can see what MP understands to be the relationship between his phenomenological views and those of Husserl.

So what do we find? Well, unlike MP, who denies that there is any truth to Augustine’s notion of the inner man, Husserl is much more sanguine. Indeed, he takes his phenomenological method, centered as it is on the loss of the world through the phenomenological epoché, to give new meaning to Augustine’s account of interiority. “I must lose the world by epoché,” he writes, “in order to regain it by a universal self-examination” (157). Thus, Augustine’s claim that truth dwells in the inner man is for Husserl not the claim that I will find God by reflection, but rather the claim that by “losing the world,” as one does in the epoché, one can focus solely on the inner realm; in this way, one can truly describe the phenomena of lived experience, according to Husserl.

The difference, then, is dramatic. On the one hand we have Husserl’s idea that the inner man is that to which one returns in order to do phenomenology properly; on the other hand we have Merleau-Ponty’s idea that there is no inner man, man is always in the world. These accounts could not be more different. And it seems to me that by referencing the passage from Husserl (without, by the way, letting the reader know that the passage occurs in Husserl!) Merleau-Ponty is explaining to the careful reader something about his interpretation of Husserl’s method. He is saying that he knows that Husserl would disagree, and indeed that he did disagree explicitly, with Merleau-Ponty’s radical Heideggerean idea that we are being-in-the-world.

Does this mean that Merleau-Ponty was being dishonest? After all, what could he have meant when he said that all of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication in Husserl? And especially what could he have meant in saying this if he knew that Husserl wouldn’t have thought it himself? But there is no dishonesty here. For the point is that MP feels he understands Husserl’s method better than even Husserl did. Indeed, the very core of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretive principle, as he says in his essay on Husserl, “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” is that great philosophers, like great artists, are often the least good at knowing the general direction in which their philosophy points. So even if it is true that Husserl believed explicitly in the realm of the inner man, divorced from the world, as the realm of true experience, that is no challenge to the claim that Husserl’s phenomenological method - when understood in its most genuine and authentic sense - has no room for such a realm. MP takes himself, and took Heidegger, to be carrying the implications of Husserl’s method to their logical conclusion, a conclusion that, as it happens, was diametrically opposed to what Husserl explicitly took himself to doing. That, it seems to me, is the importance of the reference to Augustine.

Who’d have thought?

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Two weeks ago I posted about MP’s view of the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger. (See post here.) The issue there was in what context to read MP’s claim that “all of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication in Husserl.” I claimed that what he really meant was that Heidegger’s methodology, though not necessarily his philosophical views, spring from Husserl. And I also claimed that “spring from” (est sorti de) really means “develops out of.” At least that’s what I intended to be saying there. The idea was that MP is not claiming, as some people propose, that Husserl already thought of everything Heidegger said. He’s claiming, instead, that if you give a “strong” reading of Husserl, then you can see that his late works ought to push him in the direction of the hermeneutic methodology that Heidegger employs in Being and Time; and they ought to do this whether Husserl understood it or not. This way of understanding MP’s view of the relation between Husserl and Heidegger sits well, I believe, with the interpretive principles he lays down in his essay on Husserl, “The Philosopher and his Shadow” (published in Signs.) In this post and the next I would like to discuss two more reasons for thinking this is the right way to understand what MP is up to in the Preface.

The first issue has to do with MP’s reading of Husserl’s notion of essence (Wesen). All the way back in the first paragraph of the Preface, MP writes, Mais la phénoménologie, c’est aussi une philosophie qui replace les essences dans l’existence et ne pense pas qu’on puisse comprendre l’homme et le monde autrement qu’à partir de leur “facticité.” Smith translates the first part of this as follows: “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence…” In my notes to this passage in my translation I wonder whether replace could mean “substitute” instead of “put back into,” since it’s not obvious what tradition phenomenology would be recovering if it “put essences back into existence.” (Bert suggests the Aristotelian tradition. Possible.) In any case, an astute reader notices that if MP meant “substitute” he’d have said remplacer instead of replacer. It’s possible that the very earliest printings took away the “m”, and that this was a mistake propagated in all the later editions. But I doubt it. I’ve got access to a printing from 1949 and it clearly says replacer. So I’m left wondering what the point of this sentence is.

Then it occurred to me. The principle meaning of replacer is to put back into, as in remettre; but a strong secondary, and figurative, reading assimilates it to ranger, to arrange or put into context. So, for instance, Robert suggests Replacer une chose dans son contexte. Replacer une histoire dans son cadre, dans son époque. On this reading we should render the phrase as follows: “But phenomenology is also a philosphy that puts essences into the context of existence.” That’s the way I propose to translate it.

Why does this make a difference? I think it completely turns around the interpretation of the sentence. On Smith’s translation we have a set of independent, self-standing essences, those items that Husserl discovered by turning towards the self in the phenomenological reduction, and phenomenology somehow puts those items back into existence. In effect, phenomenology essentializes existence. On the new reading, however, it’s just the opposite. Instead of putting essences into existence, we understand essence in the context of existence. In effect, we existentialize essences instead of essentializing existence. That means that essences are no longer independent, self-standing items that are discovered by a radical turn to the self of the sort proposed in the traditional version of the phenomenological reduction. Rather, they are already imbued with existence, with facticity, from the very start. This coheres with other things that MP says about the reduction (“the most important lesson of the reduction is that it can never be completed,” for example), and even makes better sense of the reference to facticity at the end of the sentence we’re translating. So it seems to me that this makes a crucial difference, and that Smith has got the translation exactly backwards.

Now, the question remains to what extent MP thought this account of essences, and of the reduction more generally, was one to which Husserl himself would assent. I believe he thinks that Husserl would reject this interpretation explicitly, and that he leaves us a very subtle clue that he thinks this in one of the footnotes to the Preface. I’ll discuss this issue in my next post.

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Well, here’s a very preliminary draft of a translation of the Preface. The footnotes are all translations of MP’s footnotes, but the endnotes and the comments are all translators notes, including a number of substantive notes that discuss issues concerning translational, interpretational, and philosophical issues. Comments welcome…

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I have now finished a very rough draft of the Preface, which I’ll put up for comment later today. But before I do that I’d like to mention a tricky problem in the very first sentence of the introduction. I’m sure that Smith has done something wrong, but I can’t quite figure out the nuance of the French…

The very first sentence of the introduction reads as follows: En commençant l’étude de la perception, nous trouvons dans le langage la notion de sensation, qui paraît immédiate et claire: je sens du rouge, du bleu, du chaud, du froid. The final phrase of the sentence seems to me very tricky. Smith writes, “I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold,” but this seems to me wrong on at least three counts. First, the word sensation, from the earlier part of the sentence, is not repeated in the French, as Smith’s translation makes it seem. Second, the French speaks of sensing the colors rouge and bleu, which are not the same as the color properties “redness” and “blueness” that Smith’s translation suggests. Finally, the sens of je sens is homonymic with the noun sens, meaning, and this connotation is completely absent from Smith’s version. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s construction suggests that our ordinary way of speaking about “sensations” already includes in it the idea that it is meaningful colors and temperatures that we sense. For that reason, I prefer the translation, “I sense red, blue, hot, cold,” which captures much of this. The English verb “I sense” is homonymic, like the French, with a noun that implies the notion of meaning. And it is colors - red, blue - that we sense rather than abstract properties - redness, blueness.

There is nevertheless still something lacking in my translation. In the French there is what seems to me a slightly strange genitival construction: je sens du rouge. Smith tries to capture this in his phrasing: “I have a sensation of redness.” But I believe [IS THIS RIGHT??!!] that the construction is doing something totally different. When one says je sens du… instead of je sens la… it seems to me one is saying something like “I feel…” instead of merely “I sense…” There are many ways to understand the difference between sensing and feeling in English. But in this case I mean to be highlighting something like the difference between having an intuitive and immediate understanding of (“I feel your pain.”) and becoming aware of through the sense receptors (which is, after all, something that a mere mechanism could do: “The thermostat senses the ambient temperature.”) My hypothesis is that Merleau-Ponty uses the genitival construction here to give the more intuitive and immediate connotation.

To the native French speakers: does this seem right? How would you characterize the difference between je sens du… and je sens la…?

In any case, if I am right about this difference, then there seems to be sticky problem in the translation. That’s because I don’t know how to convey the difference between “feeling” and “sensing” in the English while keeping all the other connotations of the sentence. In some ways this may not be such a big issue. After all, the idea that I have an intuitive, rather than merely mechanical, way into colors merely reinforces what is already suggested by the idea that I sense meaningful aspects of objects and the environment. The thermostat doesn’t really sense how warm or cold it is in here; it responds mechanically to some abstract property of the immediate environment. So if the genitival construction is doing what I think it is, then I might not need to add anything else to highlight it. Still, I’d like to know…

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For those of you in the Princeton area, the first, organizational meeting for the Merleau-Ponty reading group will take place today (Friday 2/10) from 2-3 in room 121 1879 Hall. Hope to see you there!

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Here’s an example in which the issue of word order (previously discussed here) seems to arise pretty starkly. On p. vii of the Preface MP writes, “je peux bien distinguer de moi le monde et les choses, puisque assurément je n’existe pas à la manière des choses.” Literally this reads, “I can easily distinguish from myself the world and things, since surely I do not exist in the manner of things.” This sounds a bit awkward in English. But is there really any way to render it less awkwardly without changing the sense of the of the sentence? I think maybe not…

Let’s focus just on the first clause. One thing that makes it sound awkward in English is the word order: “I can easily distinguish from myself the world and things.” The “from” seems to be in the wrong place. It would be more natural to say in English, “I can easily distinguish myself from the world and things.” But wait. Does this have the same connotation? In the original the act I am capable of distinguishes from myself the world and things. In the new translation, however, the act distinguishes myself from the world and things. Surely there is a difference between these. Surely there is a difference, in other words, between distinguishing “from A’s B’s” and distinguishing “A’s from B’s.” Indeed, it seems to me that I might very well be able to do the one but not the other.

For example, suppose I can distinguish “from lima beans kidney beans.” I suppose I might be able to do this under the following circumstances: I can recognize lima beans whenever I see them, and although I can’t recognize kidney beans on their own I nevertheless know that they are not lima beans. When confronted with a mixed pile of beans and the desire to distinguish “from the limas the kidneys,” what do I do? Well, under the circumstances I suppose I will pull out all the ones I recognize to be lima beans, and leave all the rest. Even if the pile contains other beans too - pinto beans, for example - it seems to me right to say that using this method I will have distinguished from the lima beans the kidney beans. But can I use this strategy to distinguish “the lima beans from the kidney beans?” It doesn’t seem so. Distinguishing “from A’s B’s” seems to require that I can identify or recognize A’s. Distinguishing “A’s from B’s,” by contrast, seems to require that I can identify or recognize B’s. The ‘from’ seems to have a directional connotation, in other words; it’s not a purely symmetric relation. And this directional connotation might very well be important to MP’s point. For I might very well, according to MP, be capable of recognizing my body in a more basic sense than I am capable of recognizing the world and things that I encounter through it. (Complicated issue: holisms and such.) So it seems I cannot get away with translating the clause less awkwardly as “I can easily distinguish my body from the world and things…”

There is another option for making the translation less awkward, but I think it may fail as well. Instead of moving the preposition, I might move the phrases themselves. So instead of the literal “I can easily distinguish from my body the world and things,” I could try, “I can easily distinguish the world and things from my body.” Now I have changed it from an act in which I am capable of distinguishing “from A’s, B’s,” to an act in which I am capable of distinguishing “B’s from A’s.” I suppose the logical structure of these two acts is the same. But isn’t the connotation - maybe what Frege called the “coloring” of the sentence - a bit different? By putting “from my body” at the head of the relation it seems to give it more prominence. It seems to indicate that the contrast class for the claim is the class in which I am distinguishing from things other than my body the world and things. If I talk about distinguishing “from A’s B’s,” in other words, it seems to highlight the idea that it is from A’s - rather than from something else - that I can distinguish B’s. By contrast, if we change the word order it seems to highlight the opposite. When I say I can distinguish “the world and things from my body” then I’ve said I can distinguish “B’s from A’s.” But doesn’t this highlight the idea that it is B’s, rather than something else, that I can distinguish from A’s?

I’m not completely confident about either of these analyses, but I think there may be something there. If there is, then it seems clear that changing the word order in either way to make it read less awkwardly in the English will run the risk of changing the sense of the original French.

Thoughts?

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Earlier I mentioned the existence of an Analytic Table of Contents in the original French, one that is missing from the Smith translation. Well, it turns out that there have long since been attempts to map that Table of Contents onto the sections of the book. (Thanks to Tony Bruce, my editor at Routledge, for pointing this out to me.) Here, for instance, is a paper from 1979 that attempts such a mapping. There are certainly difficulties - especially as one gets farther along in the text. But one suggestion the author of this paper (Daniel Guerrière) makes is that MP was not totally dismissive of such an organizational structure. Indeed, he suggests that the organizational sections of the TOC usually correspond to the paragraphs in the original French text. This would make a lot of sense. In particular, it would explain why the paragraphs often go on for so many pages. MP, it seems, may not have been using paragraphs the way we do, to identify a single main idea, but rather as a way of indicating larger subsections of each chapter. There are still problems, of course. Merleau-Ponty’s writing style is in a certain sense holistic, and that stands in tension with the idea of a grand organizational structure to the text. But if the paragraphing structure really does map onto his own Analytic Table of Contents, or even if it does approximately, then that seems a strong indication that he was trying to put an organizational structure on the text even if it may have resisted. And that seems to give the translator a reason to indicate such a structural plan. Thoughts?

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Why do we need a new translation of PP? Here’s the case I’ve made to Routledge. (Word document.)

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Ok, then - here it is. A first attempt at translating paragraph 1 of the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception. It’s a Word document with lots of comments highlighting places where I think there are potential issues. It’s substantially different from the Smith translation both in style and in substance, but I hope the changes are for the better. I’m counting on readers to let me know where I’ve gone wrong…

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In the opening paragraph of the Preface to PP, Merleau-Ponty makes the well-known claim that Heidegger is just cribbing from Husserl: “all of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication in Husserl,” as Smith translates it. But is this really what MP is saying? It seems to me a bit more complicated in the French. More in extended…

The context for the claim about Heidegger is set by the two sentences previous to it. In the first of these MP suggests an apparent contradiction in Husserl’s method. The contradiction is between the claim that phenomenology is a “direct description of our experience as it is,” and the references in the last works to “genetic” and even “constructive” phenomenology. How can we be giving a “direct description” of experience if we are tracing its genesis and even constructing it? MP doesn’t answer this question, however, but in typical Merleau-Ponty fashion asks a different one. In French the question he asks is this: “Voudra-t-on lever ces contradictions en distinguant entre la phénoménologie de Husserl et celle de Heidegger?” I propose to translate the question thus: “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing between Husserl’s phenomenology and that of Heidegger?” If this is the right way to take the French, then the passage seems to indicate that the question MP is interested in is whether or not the existence of methodological inconsistencies is the key to the distinction between Husserl and Heidegger. “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing between the two?”

It is in answer to this question that MP writes about the relation between Husserl and Heidegger. As he says, “Mais tout Sein und Zeit est sorti d’ une indication de Husserl et n’ est en somme qu’ une explication du ” natürlichen weltbegriff ” ou du ” lebenswelt ” que Husserl, à la fin de sa vie, donnait pour thème premier à la phénoménologie…” The suggestion seems to be that because Heidegger is himself interested in late Husserlian phenomena like the Lebenswelt, we are not likely to find the distinction between him and Husserl to lie in Heidegger’s method being less “genetic” and more “descriptive” than Husserl’s. In this, at least, the two philosophers are alike.

I’m not sure whether this is a good reading of the passage, but I think something in the area is at least possible. Whether this is a good reading or not, however, it is certain that the Smith translation obscures it competely. To begin with, he turns the principle question into a rhetorical statement. Instead of asking “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing…” Smith proposes the following translation: “One may try to do away with these contradictions by making a distinction between Hu and Heid…” On this version the distinction between Husserl and Heidegger is proposed in an attempt to “do away with” [lever?] the methodological contradictions. In the original version, however, the question seems to be not whether the contradictions can be excised by drawing a distinction between the two philosophers, but rather whether the distinction between the philosophers - which admittedly exists - consists primarily in the presence or absence of methodological contradictions. If that is the real context of the passage, then the claim that “the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication in Husserl” - and indeed from an indication in late Husserl - shows not that Heidegger’s philosophical position is the same as Husserl’s, but that his project is every bit as much a genetic one (or perhaps Heidegger would say a hermeneutic one) as Husserl’s is. This seems to me not only a better reading of the French, but also quite possibly true.

What do you think?

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