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…
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.
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…
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…
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