Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are two of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, yet they work within traditions that are generally regarded as standing in contrast to one another. However,, as this outstanding collection demonstrates, there are many simiHowever larities between them. Both reject a Cartesian picture of the mind and offer an alternative that does justice to the role played by bodily action, language, and our membership within a community that shares a way of life. This is the first collection to compare and contrast the work of these two major philosophers. Fundamental topics and problems discussed include their engagement with Gestalt psychology; the role of community in their philosophies; the parallels between Merleau-Ponty on representation and depiction and Wittgenstein on saying and doing; their treatment of expression; solipsism; and indeterminacy, indeterminacy, knowledge and certainty certainty.. It is essential reading for anyone studying the work of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty,, as well as those interested in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Komarine Romdenh-Romluc is Romdenh-Romluc is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is author of The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception (2011).
Routledge Research in Phenomenology Edited by Søren Overgaard, Overgaard,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark Komarine Romdenh-Romluc,
University of Sheffield, UK David Cerbone,
West Virginia University, USA 1 Phenomenology Phenome nology and the Transcendental ranscend ental
Edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo and Timo Miettinen 2 Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology Conceptual and Empirical Approaches
Edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou, and Walter Hopp 3 Phenomenology of Sociality Discovering the ‘We’
Edited by Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran 4 Phenomenology of Thinking Philosophical Investigations into the Character of Cognitive Experiences
Edited by Thiemo Breyer and Christopher Gutland 5
Wittgenstein Wittg enstein and Merleau-Ponty
Edited by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty Edited by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine, editor. Title: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty / edited by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge research in phenomenlogy ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053812 | ISBN 9780415625128 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. | Phenomenology. Classification: LCC B3376.W564 W52135 2017 | DDC 192—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053812 ISBN: 978-0-415-62512-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75484-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Abbreviations of Cited Works by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty Introduction
vii
1
KOMARINE ROMDENH-ROMLUC
1
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology
11
KATHERINE J. MORRIS
2
Expression
31
KATHLEEN LENNON
3
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading: Exposing the Myth of the Given Mind
49
SØREN OVERGAARD
4
Community Without Conservatism: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the Sociality of Subjectivity
66
CHANTAL BAX
5
The World and I
81
KOMARINE ROMDENH-ROMLUC
6
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision
100
TAYLOR CARMAN
7
The Recovery of Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein DAVID R. CERBONE
114
vi Contents
8
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty
137
THOMAS BALDWIN
Contributors Index
175 177
Abbreviations of Cited Works by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty
Wittgenstein 1969. Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. 1980. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. Von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. LC 1966. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief . Edited by C. Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell. LPP 1988. Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–7 , notes by P. T. Geach, K. J. Shah and A. C. Jackson. Edited by P. Geach. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. LW II 1992. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology ; Volume II. Edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. LW I 1982. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology , Volume I. Edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, translated by. C. G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. OC 1972. On Certainty. Edited and translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Harper and Row. PI 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. PO 1993. Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951. Edited by J. Klagge and A. Nordman. Indianapolis: Hackett. PR 1975. Philosophical Remarks. Edited by R. Rhees, translated by R. Hargreaves and R. White. Oxford: Blackwell. RC 1977. Remarks on Colour. Oxford: Blackwell. RFM 1978. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. RPP I 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. RPP II 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. BB CV
viii TLP Z
Abbreviations of Cited Works by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty 1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge. 1967. Zettel . Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Merleau-Ponty CPP
HLP PhP PrP PW S SB SNS WP VI
2010. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952. Translated by T. Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2002. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology . Translated by L. Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2011. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by D. Landes. London: Routledge. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Edited by J. Edie, translated by various. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973. Prose of the World . Edited by C. Lefort, translated by J. O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1964. Signs. Translated by R. C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Translated by A. L. Fisher. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2004. The World of Perception. Translated by O. Davis. London: Routledge. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by C. Lefort, translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Numbered remarks are marked §. Other references are to page numbers.
Introduction Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein are two of the most important writers in twentieth century, Western philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is a leading figure in the phenomenological movement. Whilst there has been sustained interest in his work since his untimely death, it has undergone something of a renaissance over the past few years, as theorists from diverse philosophical backgrounds, and from a variety of different disciplines, appeal to it as a rich source of ideas that can help illuminate many contemporary debates. Wittgenstein’s work is perhaps best known in the context of British analytic philosophy, where his influence cannot be underestimated. Whilst these philosophical movements are often held up as standing in some kind of opposition, there are various overlaps and interconnections between them. It is thus perhaps not entirely surprising that there are various striking parallels between the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. The aim of this volume is to explore some of these points of comparison. One thread that runs through all the papers in this volume is an important similarity between their respective philosophical projects. Both begin with descriptions of everyday phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, this marks his explicit commitment to the phenomenology movement. The extent to which Wittgenstein read phenomenological works, or was influenced by writers in this tradition, is unclear. However, as Spiegelberg (1981) notes, Wittgenstein uses the term ‘phänomenologie’ in relation to his own work in a few places, and whilst it is not obvious that this signalled any explicit engagement with, or commitment to, the phenomenological tradition, it does perhaps indicate his interest in descriptions of ordinary phenomena as the starting-point for philosophy.1 On the face of it, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein describe different things. Merleau-Ponty’s central concern is experience. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, focuses on linguistic behaviour, captured by his famous notion of language games. However, as Katherine Morris notes in her paper for the volume, it would be a mistake to think that this marks a significant gulf between their approaches. As the idea of a language-game makes clear, our language is embedded in our forms of life, and if we want to understand the former, we need some grasp of the latter. One way to think of a form of life is as some general way (or collection of loosely related ways) of engaging
2 Introduction with the world. It includes a set of practices, taken-for-granted ideas, behaviour, experiences, and so on—all the miscellanea that make up the largely implicit ‘background’ to our existence. Thus Wittgenstein’s interest in language takes in a lot more than just a set of symbols and their syntax. It is wider, even, than just a focus on explicit language use. Similarly, MerleauPonty’s conception of experience is not of an inner datum, available only to introspection. Instead, experience means, for him, the life-world— the world as we experience it and interact with it—together with the details of our own lives, our practices, and our behaviour, including our linguistic activities. It follows that whilst their investigations do not completely coincide, there is significant overlap between them. In addition, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein argue for the need to overthrow a distorted picture of the world and our place in it, which they seek to do by examining everyday phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty, this is the framework of Objective Thought: a conception of the world as reducible to its most basic atoms, which stand in causal connections to one another. This basic understanding of the world gives rise to two apparently opposed positions. These are Empiricism, which takes consciousness to be just one of the things in the world, and so a physical entity that is reducible to its basic atoms and whose behaviour can be fully explained in terms of causal laws; and Intellectualism, which holds that consciousness constitutes the world and as such, is unlike anything within it. Neither of these views correctly captures the real nature of things, according to Merleau-Ponty. The picture to be overthrown by Wittgenstein’s work is presented less as a global way of thinking and more a ragtag bag of different, deeply entrenched ideas. These include a Cartesian picture of the mind as a soul hidden in the body; an Augustinian conception of language as a uniform, formal system; and the idea of the self as essentially isolated, to name just three. It is hopefully clear from just this brief summary that there are some parallels between at least some of the ideas the two philosophers reject. If one wishes to start from the everyday phenomena, an obvious question to ask is: what are they, and how should we characterise them? In answering this question, Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Gestalt psychology—a field he studied extensively. The notion of the Gestalt—a meaningful unity that characterises perceptual experience—assumes a central importance in his work, since he takes it to reveal a deep truth about the status of our world, our relation to it, and our own nature. This interest in Gestalt psychology is something he shares with Wittgenstein. The latter was much less familiar with Gestalt psychology but studied a few works in much depth. He was particularly interested in the ideas of Wolfgang Köhler, which he addressed at length in his last lectures. In the first paper of this volume, Katherine Morris examines Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s respective reactions to Köhler’s work, using this as a springboard to reflect more widely on similarities between their philosophical ideas.
Introduction 3 Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty both criticize Köhler’s descriptions of Gestalt phenomena. On the face of it, this is for very different reasons. Wittgenstein argues that ambiguous figures that can be seen in more than one way, such as the duck-rabbit, constitute a paradox. In the shift from duck to rabbit or vice versa—what is commonly known as a Gestalt-switch— everything remains the same, yet something also alters. This leads him to distinguish two different senses of the word ‘see’. Morris tells us that Wittgenstein draws this distinction with two examples: ‘I see this’, and, ‘I see a likeness between these two faces’. The answer to the paradox is that what remains the same throughout a Gestalt switch is seen in the first sense, whilst what changes is seen in the second sense. He criticizes Köhler for not recognising this difference between types of seeing. Wittgenstein connects the second sense of seeing with the perception of other phenomena, which are ubiquitous in our experience of the world, such as depth, the perception of a figure against a background, and awareness of three-dimensionality. He then emphasizes the idea that to understand the second sense of perception, we have to acknowledge that we can perceive meanings. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, criticizes Köhler and the other Gestalt psychologists for failing to see the implications of their discoveries. Morris presents two of MerleauPonty’s lines of thought in this regard. First, he takes Gestalt phenomena to put pressure on certain dichotomies that characterize our conceptual framework. These include: cause versus reason, explicit awareness versus being unaware, mind versus world, and consciousness versus body. Second, he argues that to properly describe Gestalt phenomena, we must reconceive the body and acknowledge the existence of distinctively bodily forms of knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, and intentionality. Despite these differences, Morris argues that there are a number of parallels between their approaches. There are some interesting resonances between the particular ideas they each marshal to make their respective cases against aspects of Köhler’s thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein can also be viewed as preoccupied with a single task: to restore meaning to human life in the face of an indefensible scientism. Merleau-Ponty puts the idea of the Gestalt to use in understanding expression. The latter notion also plays an important role for Wittgenstein, and although he does not make explicit use of Gestalt psychology in his discussion of this topic, some of the claims he makes about expression coincide with Merleau-Ponty’s. Kathleen Lennon’s essay considers some central ways in which expression figures in their work, and the accounts they give of it. Both thinkers employ the notion to provide an alternative to the picture of the mind as an internal, Cartesian realm and as a means to do away with dichotomies between the inner and the outer, self and others. The idea of expression is perhaps most readily associated with their discussions of bodily gestures as manifesting psychological life—both our own and those of others we encounter. As Lennon shows, the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and
4 Introduction Wittgenstein are very close on this topic. The notion of the Gestalt is helpful to capture how seeing the psychological written on the body is irreducible to mere physiology, without thereby being something internal. Crucially, a Gestalt is nothing over and above the elements in which it is realized, but at the same time, cannot be reduced to those elements. This is aptly demonstrated by a figure like the duck-rabbit. It can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, but this switch in perceptual meaning occurs without any change in the lines and shapes that make up the diagram. Yet the perceptual meaning is not something extra to those elements either; take away the lines and shapes, and no perceptual meaning persists. Similarly, a body’s expressing sadness is manifest in its gestures and interactions with the world, but it is not reducible to a series of brute physiological facts. Both writers also connect grasping the Gestalt of an expressive body with its soliciting a meaningful response from the perceiver. We are not detached observers of others; we interact with them, sharing a way of life against the background of a common world. Both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are interested in the expressive power of art, which both see as extending the expressive gestures of the body. They emphasize the fact that—like bodily gestures more generally—artistic expression gains its significance from its place in a shared way of life. Meaning is generated intersubjectively. Finally, Merleau-Ponty employs the notion of expression to characterize the world—something that goes beyond anything we find in Wittgenstein’s thinking. He holds that the world itself is expressive. It is characterised by Gestalten, invites responses from us, and is expressed by the gestures we perform in answer to these invitations—gestures that help give shape to the world. Similarly, the idea of expression is also key to understanding our ontological status for MerleauPonty. We are beings that weave together the inner and outer, the physical and psychological self and world. Søren Overgaard takes up one of the themes touched upon by Lennon’s piece. He considers how we come to know about other people’s psychological lives and relates ideas from Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty to an important contemporary debate in this area. The ability to discern how things are with another subject is often called ‘mindreading’. There are three central theories that seek to explain how we mindread others: ‘theory-theory’, which claims we do this by employing a theory that connects observable behaviour with psychological states; ‘simulation theory’, which states that we do this by putting ourselves in the other’s position to see what we would think or feel in his or her circumstances and then ascribe this to him or her (this can either be a conscious activity of imagining or a subpersonal process); and ‘perception theory’, a relative newcomer to the debate, which claims that we just perceive how the other is feeling or what he or she is thinking. Proponents of perception theory often cite Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as forerunners of this account. Overgaard particularly discusses the work of Shaun Gallagher in this regard. As Lennon shows in her paper for this volume, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein argue
Introduction 5 that we immediately perceive others’ bodies as expressing their psychological lives. However, Overgaard argues that perception theorists move too quickly from the recognition that minds are not hidden but perceptible features of the world, to claim that theories that posit a role for inference in mindreading are thereby redundant. Such a move depends on a thesis explicitly rejected by both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, which Overgaard dubs ‘the myth of the given mind’. Whilst we perceive others’ psychological states as expressed by their bodily gestures, we see them in a different sense to the way in which we see something like colour. To perceive another’s gesture as expressing her psychological life is an achievement, and one that must be explained. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein both take this to be made possible by our insertion in a particular socio-cultural milieu—a particular community that reciprocally recognizes each other’s expressive gestures. Theorists like Gallagher are thus wrong to suppose that accounts like theory theory and simulation theory are instantly made redundant by the recognition that others’ psychological lives are perceptible. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein both seek to provide an alternative notion of the self to the dominant Cartesian view of a disembodied individual, reaching universal truths through deployment of rational principles. Merleau-Ponty’s thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the body springs to mind most readily in this regard. But, he also emphasised the irreducibly social nature of the self—something to which Wittgenstein also paid a great deal of attention. However, it has been suggested that an account that takes the self to be shaped by its socio-cultural environment cannot accommodate the possibility of political change. This seems to be implied by Wittgenstein’s view. Chantal Bax considers the ideas he puts forward in On Certainty. There he argues that certain propositions, such as that the earth exists, are not things we know because they are not things we can justify. Moreover, they seem more certain than other propositions, and they are not usually things we call into question or debate. These certainties, or hinge propositions, are instead things we have to take for granted in order to gain any knowledge. They form the background to our engagement with the world. Moreover, we gain them as children via training, and often they are never explicitly entertained. Wittgenstein also suggests that we can only interact with other people on the basis of a shared number of certainties. It is clear how this implies that the self is reactionary. Since certainties are not explicitly entertained, are difficult to question, and have to be taken for granted to interact with the world and other people, the self does not seem to be capable of calling into question the set of certainties that ground her engagement with the world, and so these seem to be beyond her powers to alter. Merleau-Ponty also takes our engagement with the world to be founded on a socio-cultural background that is taken for granted and something of which we are only implicitly aware. But his account makes it clear how the subject can actively change her socio-cultural context. Her situation neither
6 Introduction causes her to behave in certain ways, nor is this a matter of explicit judgements. Instead, her situation motivates her but in a way that is indeterminate. The facts of her situation solicit her to act in certain ways, but a number of courses of action are consistent with what is suggested by her socio-cultural context. Having acted in one way, this can bring other possibilities to light, which can motivate further actions. Chantal Bax describes Merleau-Ponty’s example of how a member of the proletariat can come to class-consciousness. He may first hear of workers in another factory gaining a higher wage as a result of a strike. The possibility of striking himself becomes salient for him. As a result, similarities between his life and those of labourers elsewhere begin to show up for him, and he begins to see possibilities for solidarity. In this way, he can come to see himself as part of an oppressed class. Finally, Chantal Bax shows how some of Wittgenstein’s remarks resonate with this picture of the self and its relation to its sociocultural environment. He allows that certainties do not form an orderly set. There are gaps and inconsistencies, which allow for the possibility of change. Since both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the constitutive role played by the community in our psychological capacities, it is perhaps surprising that they take solipsism—the view that the self is, in some sense, alone—seriously. I address this aspect of their writing in my contribution to this volume. There are different forms of solipsism. One might hold that the self is completely alone in a world of non-selves or that it is only one of a special kind of self—a god amongst mortals. One might take such claims to be about what really exists; or claims concerning what one can know; or claims about the character of experience. I take both MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein to be interested in the latter, phenomenological sort of solipsism. My discussion begins with something of a puzzle raised by Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of solipsism in Phenomenology of Perception. One might think that his conception of consciousness as embodied means that we simply perceive other selves and so solipsism is just not an issue for him. However, as Lennon and Overgaard note in their papers for this volume, it does not follow from the mere fact that minds are perceptible that we actually perceive them as minds. Neither does it follow from the fact that other human beings are selves just like me that I perceive them as the same kind of subject as me. Thus he holds that, in spite of his account of embodied consciousness, solipsism is still an issue for him. Both MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein take there to be an important connection between having a perspective on the world and solipsism. Merleau-Ponty says little about this, but Wittgenstein offers a detailed description of it. He suggests that the self is a bare point of view on the world and as such, cannot be identified with any item in it. This includes one’s own body. A bare perspective is not an inner Cartesian realm. It is not the sort of thing that can own mental states, at all. Thus one’s psychological life must be thought of as happening in the world. It is something on which one has a perspective, but it is no more ‘owned’ by me than other worldly events. This picture is
Introduction 7 solipsistic because the world is presented as revolving around me. As such, it is my world—the disembodied, godlike perspective at its centre. Wittgenstein’s description of solipsistic experience has a striking resonance with some of the experiences that characterise schizophrenia. However, it cannot stand on its own, since it does not offer a description of non-schizophrenic experience. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of bodily experience provides what is missing from Wittgenstein’s account. The non-schizophrenic subject does not experience herself as a bare perspective but as a bodily point of view on the world. This is possible because there is a form of bodily awareness that is ‘adverbial’ in structure and does not present the body as an object on which the subject has a perspective. Second, the momentary transfer of the body schema allows the subject to experience the world as revolving around other subjects, thus decentring her own perspective, and allowing her to experience the world as one shared with other similar selves. Parts of Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s respective projects of dismantling what they show to be distorted views of the world centre on the notion of representation—something that is central to understanding the mind and its relation to the world. Taylor Carman’s piece for this volume explores the nature of representation through the idea that there is always a surplus of meaning over and above the representational content. Both MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein put forward this claim. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion focuses particularly on pictures or images, whilst Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing indicates that even symbolic forms of representation such as language have a meaning—show something—beyond what they say or depict. Whilst Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty do not give us quite the same idea of this surplus, bringing them together like this reveals something interesting. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the residue of meaning found in images directs our attention to the fact that whilst they may have conventional aspects, they are not purely conventional in the same way as language. It is arbitrary that English speakers use the noise ‘cat’ to represent a certain sort of feline being, but whilst there are many different ways to picture a cat, not just any arrangement of lines on a page will do. Yet at the same time, images are not of their objects in virtue of resembling them, if this is understood as sharing a sufficient number of properties. A portrait of Toussaint Louverture is a flat arrangement of coloured paint on a canvas, but the man himself was a flesh-and-blood, living being. Images are nevertheless likenesses of their objects in that perceivers see them as alike. Thus a statement of what an image is of, or represents—for example, Toussaint Louverture riding into battle—can never capture what is essential to images: the visual presence of their objects. Despite this difference between images and language, Wittgenstein’s idea that language shows something beyond what it says or represents points to an important way in which pictures and language are similar. Carman suggests that this is captured by Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that the different types of representation lie on a continuum with perception itself. All are forms of expression. Even perception
8 Introduction expresses the world because it is not the passive recording of data, but the manifestation of the body’s ‘apprehension’ of its environment. Types of representation differ in their degree of closeness to perceptual engagement with the world. Images are very close to perception and so can conjure up visual presence in a way that language cannot. But even more remote forms of expression, such as non-poetic language, are nevertheless rooted in our bodily engagement with, and perceptual grasp of, the world, and so retain a surplus of meaning over and above what they represent. The notion of representation is closely connected to another important topic discussed by Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein: indeterminacy. David Cerbone considers their treatment of this issue. Both writers draw attention to indeterminacy at the heart of our meaningful engagement with the world. Neither experience nor language admit of the sort of determinacy we usually expect to find there. The foil to Cerbone’s discussion of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein is Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation—one of the most influential treatments of the indeterminacy of meaning in analytic philosophy. Quine argues that the linguistic behaviour of any community is compatible with two or more incompatible manuals translating their language. Moreover, there is no fact of the matter concerning which manual is the correct one. Quine takes this indeterminacy to show that issues to do with meaning are not about properly objective matters of fact. This has wider repercussions for questions to do with the mind itself. Quine argues that ‘intentional idioms’ such as ‘x believes that p’ fall short of the gold standard of scientific theorizing. Against the background of this thesis, MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein’s ideas come sharply into view. Like Quine, both thinkers point to what Cerbone calls ‘the fact of indeterminacy’ in our perceptual experience, our language, our meaningful behaviour, and so on. But unlike Quine, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein do not take indeterminacy to be a negative feature of our meaningful engagement with the world— a falling-short of some more exacting ideal. Instead, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein critique the pictures that hold such an ideal before us as fundamentally flawed. Two central examples are Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following, where he argues that a completely determinate language would require an infinite set of rules specifying its use. To demand determinacy is thus to require something impossible and something that we do not need as we get along perfectly well without it. Merleau-Ponty connects indeterminacy in perceptual experience with having a point of view. Perceiving the world from a location within it means that at any particular time, parts of it will be hidden from view and so experienced as there but indeterminate. The demand that experience present a fully determinate universe is destructive of perspective and so of experience itself. Both writers connect indeterminacy with flexibility or variability. They point out that the indeterminacy displayed by meaningful behaviour gives it a flexibility that distinguishes it from activity that is purely mechanistic. Wittgenstein describes the variability of the expressive body as its being ‘full of soul’ (i.e., its being
Introduction 9 shot through with subjectivity). Merleau-Ponty makes essentially the same connection. Mechanism—the strict following of circumscribed rules with no variation—is the antithesis of expression, which (Lennon discusses in this volume) is essentially creative and so admitting of variation, even as it makes use of already instituted meanings, which have somewhat determinate rules for their usage. It follows that, for both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, indeterminacy is a constitutive feature of our meaningful engagement with the world. It is not the falling short of an ideal but that without which there could be no meaning. The final paper by Thomas Baldwin takes up some of the themes touched on by other papers in this volume. His central concern is to trace the points of contact and departure between Wittgenstein’s account of the certainties—what are sometimes called, ‘hinge propositions’—that underpin our everyday engagement with the world, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perceptual faith—his claim that the world in general is something of which we can be absolutely certain. A striking point of comparison between the two thinkers is the peculiar status they both accord to that which is certain. For Wittgenstein, hinge propositions are not items of knowledge in the usual sense, since they lack justification. But this does not mean they are just dogmatically asserted either. They make possible our everyday engagement with the world. Since they must be presupposed for even the sceptic’s doubt to be cogent, they cannot themselves be doubted. Merleau-Ponty also advances a position that lies between these two alternatives. He argues— contra dogmatism—that experience of any particular thing is fallible. But the sceptic’s doubts only make sense against a background of contact with the world, which is likewise presupposed by any thought or action as the condition of its possibility. However, despite these and other similarities between their accounts, there are, nevertheless, some important differences. Wittgenstein’s picture is ultimately holistic, despite the role played by hinge propositions in the system. These are not completely beyond revision—something Chantal Bax emphasizes in her piece for this collection. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, sees the body’s non-thetic, pre-predicative understanding of the world as the foundation for conceptual thought. This opposition is mitigated somewhat by Wittgenstein’s conception of non-linguistic behaviour as playing a foundational role for the first languages and Merleau-Ponty’s account of a dialectical interplay between conceptual thought and bodily understanding. A more significant disagreement concerns the issue of idealism. MerleauPonty’s position is ultimately a form of transcendental idealism. The lived world that is presented in experience, the only one we can know about, comes into being through perception. The perceiving subject thus plays a constituting role with respect to the world. Like Kant, Merleau-Ponty’s account allows for a notion of objective empirical reality, which he secures on the basis of the claim that there is a commonality to adult human experience. Indeed, Baldwin reads him as asserting the superiority of the mature
10 Introduction experience of civilised people, which functions as the standard from which the experiences of children, the sick, animals, and so on, deviate—a move that is problematic. Unlike Kant’s transcendental ego, however, MerleauPonty’s constituting subject is bodily. (It should be noted that this is only one aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s position. As a part of the world, the embodied subject is also constituted in perception. His ultimate account of the world and subject sees them as mutually constituting moments of a single existence that bifurcates in perception.) Wittgenstein’s work, on the other hand, contains nothing akin to transcendental idealism. Baldwin traces ways in which Wittgenstein’s later thinking endorses a form of naturalism and as such, stands in stark contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s account. In the end, this difference in their ontological stances marks an important difference between them.
Note 1 The issue of Wittgenstein’s phenomenology is controversial. It has been discussed by various authors in addition to Spiegelberg (1981), e.g., Gier (1981), Hintikka (1996), Park (2012), Monk (2014), and Vrahimis (2014).
References Gier, N. 1981. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hintikka, J. 1996. The idea of phenomenology in Wittgenstein and Husserl. In J. Hintikka (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 55–77. Monk, R. 2014. The temptations of phenomenology: Wittgenstein, the synthetic a priori and the ‘analytic a posteriori’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (3): 312–340. Park, B. C. 2012. Phenomenological Aspects of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Spiegelberg, H. 1981. The puzzle of Wittgenstein’s Phänomenologie (1929–?). In H. Spiegelberg (ed.), The Context of the Phenomenological Movement . The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 202–28. Vrahimis, A. 2014. Wittgenstein and the phenomenological movement: Reply to Monk. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (3): 341–348.
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Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology1 Katherine J. Morris
Most famous for their researches on perception (and visual perception in particular), the Gestalt psychologists developed their theories, mainly in Germany, over roughly the same period as Husserl was developing phenomenology, and to some degree in dialogue with Husserl; 2 this was also the period of Wittgenstein’s ‘early’ philosophy. Both Wittgenstein (in his ‘later’ period)3 and Merleau-Ponty (throughout his philosophical career) engaged directly with Gestalt psychology. Wittgenstein read rather little, although things that interested him for whatever reason he read in great depth. This category includes Köhler’s Gestalt Psychology (1947, hereafter GP),4 to which Wittgenstein came late in his career; 5 he discussed Köhler extensively in his last lectures in 1947 (students’ notes on these lectures are published as Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–7 ).6 Schulte goes so far as to say that GP ‘was the single most important influence on Wittgenstein during those years’ (1993: 76). Wittgenstein’s Köhler period was roughly contemporaneous with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. MerleauPonty was much more of a typical academic than Wittgenstein; he read widely in the psychology of his day, and he regularly characterised Gestalt psychology as ‘the new psychology’, as opposed to the empiricist and intellectualist psychology that had dominated previously. Because Köhler is the main common denominator in their reading about Gestalt psychology, all of the references to Gestalt psychology in this essay will be to Köhler and most to the book Gestalt Psychology. I will focus on Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of Gestalt psychology’s descriptions of the perceived world. 7 At first sight, Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s responses to these descriptions seem almost diametrically opposed. Wittgenstein was clearly intrigued by some of the phenomena to which the Gestalt psychologists drew attention but thought their descriptions of these phenomena confused. Merleau-Ponty, by apparent contrast, refers to the Gestalt psychologists as ‘the very psychologists who described the world as I did’ ( PrP 23); his primary objection is Gestalt psychology’s failure to see the revolutionary consequences of its own discoveries. I will ultimately suggest that this appearance of diametrical opposition is misleading. Section 1 outlines GP’s descriptions of the perceived world. Sections 2 and 3 bring out Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s principal objections. 8
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Section 4 tries to bring Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with one another. The final section (5) reflects on this dialogue by way of drawing a few conclusions.
1. Gestalt Psychology’s Descriptions of the Perceived World A great deal of GP is polemical, arguing against two strands of empiricist psychology, which then dominated the field: behaviourism (about which I can say no more in the present context) and what was known as introspectionism, whose basic premise is ‘the all-important distinction between sensations and perceptions, between the bare sensory material as such and the host of other ingredients with which this material has become imbued by processes of learning’ (GP 43). On this view, the sensation is ‘the genuine sensory fact’, by contrast with those ‘mere products of learning’ ( GP 44). When we add to this move a bit of basic information about physics, optics, and the physiology of seeing, it can seem irresistible to assert that the ‘genuine sensory fact’ causally depends solely on the image on the retina, and that everything else we say we see isn’t strictly speaking seen, since it brings in further knowledge. Note, just for example, that this would imply that we cannot strictly speaking see depth (distance, three-dimensionality), since the image on the retina is two-dimensional. Gestalt psychology’s conception of perception stands in sharp contrast to this. The most basic notion in Gestalt psychology is that of organisation, which, Köhler argues (GP 81), empiricism cannot accommodate. This term ‘organisation’ points us in the direction of what the Gestalt psychologists call ‘circumscribed units’: ‘In most visual fields the contents of particular areas “belong together” as circumscribed units from which their surroundings are excluded’ ( GP 80–1), for example, ‘things: a piece of paper, a pencil, an eraser, a cigarette, and so forth’ ( GP 81).9 ‘Gestalten’ include both these segregated units and ‘groupings’ of such units: ‘a given unit may be segregated and yet at the same time belong to a larger unit’ (GP 84; cf. GP 95, 120). For instance, in Figure 1.1, each patch is itself a segregated unit, but the patches are also grouped into two groups of three patches each, as ‘everyone beholds’ ( GP 83). The groups consist of the three on the left and the three on the right, even though they could equally just be six patches, or the two groups consisting of the three on top and the three below, etc.
Figure 1.1
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 13
Figure 1.2
Of particular interest to Wittgenstein are what the Gestalt psychologists call ‘reversals’ in ambiguous figures (i.e., figures which spontaneously admit of different organisations). Consider Figure 1.2: whereas we might at first see ‘an object formed by three narrow sectors’, we may ‘suddenly see another pattern. Now the lines which belonged together as boundaries of a narrow sector are separated; they have become boundaries of large sectors. Clearly, the organisation of the pattern has changed’ ( GP 100). Thus ( pace the introspectionists) ‘[w]ith a constant pattern of [retinal] stimuli, we may see . . . two different shapes’ ( GP 107). Of especial importance to the phenomenologists are various characteristics of gestalten, especially those characteristics that contribute to the unity of the gestalt. According to the Gestalt psychologists, perceived objects maintain their apparent size, shape, colour, etc.—and hence their unity—through variations in distance, orientation, lighting, and so on. Hence they will speak of various ‘constancies’ : ‘size constancy’, ‘shape constancy’, ‘colour constancy’, and so on. (Note that the introspectionists cannot allow such constancies, since, for example, the projection of a circular object such as a plate on the retina will vary in shape if the object is tilted.) Also important to the phenomenologists are such essential characteristics of gestalten as figure-ground structure (which, again, is impossible for the introspectionists to accommodate). A ‘circumscribed unit’ (the figure) is segregated from its surroundings (the ground), the figure having ‘the character of solidity or substantiality’, the ground being ‘loose or empty’ and ‘unshaped’ (GP 120). (Figure 1.2 above displays a figure-ground ambiguity: as long as we are seeing the cross with the slender arms, the area of the cross with the wider arms ‘is absorbed into the background, and its visual shape is non-existent’, ( GP 107); in addition, ‘the oblique lines are the boundaries of the shapes which are seen at the time’, i.e., in this case they ‘belong to’ the slender cross, ( GP 108, etc.) )
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2. Wittgenstein’s Criticisms of Köhler’s Descriptions Wittgenstein’s best-known discussion of the Gestalt psychologists’ descriptions occurs in his treatment of ‘aspect-seeing’ in PI II §xi.10 His initial focus is on ‘reversals’ of ambiguous figures; Wittgenstein reproduces a number of such figures, including most famously the ‘duck-rabbit’ (from Jastrow 1899), but also the ‘double cross’ (PI II 207), which is similar to Figure 1.2 above. Wittgenstein speaks of the different organisations of these figures as ‘aspects’ and of reversals as ‘changes of aspect’. What appears to strike Wittgenstein about reversals is a kind of paradox, which he expresses thus: ‘One would like to say: “Something has altered, and nothing has altered” ’ (RPP I §966).11 This ‘paradox’ is essential to a change of aspect.
W1. Two (or Three?) Uses of the Word ‘See’ Wittgenstein is as resistant as Köhler to the empiricist temptation to say we don’t (strictly speaking) see aspects: ‘if someone wanted to correct me and say I don’t really see [these things, but only shapes and colours], I should hold this to be a piece of stupidity’ ( RPP I §1101).12 Wittgenstein’s central objection to Köhler is that he supposes that we see organisation in the same sense that we see colour and shape (cf., e.g., RPP I §1023). Not only does this involve a conflation, it means that Köhler can neither express nor dissolve the ‘paradox’. Köhler’s view apparently implies that what one sees changes in a change of aspect in the same sense that what one sees would change were the colours and shapes to alter. (A change in organisation ‘amounts to an actual transformation of given sensory facts into others’ ( GP 99).) Wittgenstein clearly takes there to be a powerful temptation to say this ( RPP I §534, cf. RPP I §535, §536, §1107). However, to give in to this temptation is to leave oneself unable to recognise the paradox which is of the essence of aspect change: there is no sense, in this case, in which everything remains the same. Wittgenstein claims that to ‘put the “organisation” of a visual impression on a level with colours and shapes’ is to proceed ‘from the idea of the visual impression as an inner object’ ( PI II 196); indeed this idea is commonly seen as the real target of these remarks. 13 From this perspective, he imagines Köhler saying that the ‘outer picture’ (e.g., the drawing of the duck-rabbit) has remained the same while the ‘inner picture’ has changed. However, this would get him nowhere: one ought to be able to represent the ‘inner picture’ with a drawing (an ‘outer picture’), since the notion of an inner picture is modelled on that of an outer picture; but if one tried to represent what the duck-rabbit was like before the change of aspect and what it is like now simply by making an exact copy of what one sees in each case, ‘no change is shewn’ (PI II 196; cf. RPP I §1041; PI I §196). Wittgenstein asserts that the phenomena of aspect-seeing and change of aspect point to ‘the difference of category between the two “objects” of
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 15 sight’ (PI II 193). Here, the two ‘ “objects” of sight’ are not the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of an aspect-change as they were for Köhler; rather, they correspond to ‘[t]wo uses of the word “see” ’, which he exemplifies thus: ‘ “I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy)’ as opposed to ‘I see a likeness between these two faces’ ( PI II 193; cf. RPP I §964). How do these exemplars relate to changes of aspect? We have seen already that any attempt to represent the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in a change of aspect with a drawing or copy would show no difference; rather, one might (for example) convey the change by first grouping the drawing with a number of other drawings of ducks, and then with a number of drawings of rabbits (cf. PI II 196–7),14 and drawing attention to the likenesses in each case. Once we have distinguished these two uses of the word ‘see’, the apparent paradox vanishes: what you see in the first use of the word ‘see’ does not change, whereas what you see in the second use changes. Importantly, the distinction, or at least some distinction, between different uses of the word ‘see’ has application beyond the rather special case of ambiguous pictures, even if other cases do not involve the ‘paradox’; since all perceived objects (not just pictures, much less just ambiguous pictures) are, according to the Gestalt psychologists, organised, many of the same issues arise for figure-ground organisation, three-dimensionality and so on. Wittgenstein clearly recognises this; thus RPP I §1023 reflects on Köhler’s commitment to the idea that ‘object’ (figure) and ‘ground’ are ‘visual concepts like red and round’ (cf. RPP I §1118: ‘Indeed, you may well say: what belongs to the description of what you see, of your visual impression, is not merely what the copy shews but also the claim, e.g., to see this “solid”, this other “as intervening space” ’). Wittgenstein suggests that if one were to ask what, in a drawing, ‘corresponded to the words “object-like” ’, the answer would be ‘the sequence, the order, in which we made the drawing’, which is surely not in the drawing in the sense that the colours and shapes are ( RPP I §1023). Again, RPP I §85 considers the question of whether depth can ‘really be seen’; he goes on to suggest that the sense in which we see colour and shape and the sense in which we see depth are different senses, the one perhaps to be represented ‘using a transparency’, the other ‘by means of a gesture or profile’ (cf. also RPP I §86). It is not entirely clear whether the sense in which we see depth, or see a thing ‘as a thing’ or as ‘object-like’, is the same as the sense in which we see aspects, thus it is not clear whether we should be speaking of a third use of ‘see’ here. For example, in the case of aspect-seeing, Wittgenstein’s distinction between two uses of ‘see’ aims to capture ‘what remains the same’ as opposed to ‘what changes’. He uses the phrase ‘shapes and colours’ repeatedly to allude to the first sense, as a kind of shorthand for ‘what remains the same’. When it comes to its application to seeing shapes and colours as opposed to seeing a thing ‘as a thing’ or as three-dimensional, can this phrase still be understood as a shorthand for ‘what remains the same’? And is seeing a thing as a thing or as three-dimensional ‘subject to the will’, as Wittgenstein
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asserts that aspect-seeing is? (Wittgenstein presents this as a further criticism of Köhler: he allegedly ‘does not deal with’ ( RPP I §971) the fact that ‘an aspect is subject to the will’, i.e. that ‘it makes no sense to say “See it red”; whereas it does make sense to say “See it as . . .” ’ (RPP I §899)—also to ask someone to try to see it as . . .—which ‘touches the essence’ of aspect-seeing (cf. RPP I §976), and thereby sheds light on the second sense of ‘see’.) In fact, the ‘analytical attitude’ ( GP 99; cf. RPP I §§1110–11), introduced in the next section, may be understood as ‘subject to the will’; if it is what we adopt in order to see ‘shapes and colours’ as opposed to ‘seeing a thing as a thing’ or ‘seeing it as three-dimensional’ (as we do in the ‘normal attitude’), then seeing in the first sense is ‘subject to the will’ (although we still cannot say ‘See it red’, we can say ‘See it as shapes and colours as opposed to seeing it as a thing’). As Wittgenstein rightly says, ‘[t]he concept of “seeing” makes a tangled impression’ (PI II 200)! I will refer to the use in which we can say that we see depth, or see a thing ‘as a thing’, as a third use, but the tangledness of the concept must always be borne in mind.
W2. Seeing Meanings Consideration of a further related objection will enrich our understanding of the second and third uses of ‘see’: ‘It is—contrary to Köhler—precisely a meaning [Bedeutung ] that I see’ ( RPP I §869; the context suggests that he is here talking about his second use of ‘see’, but I think that he would extend this to the third use).15 What is Wittgenstein’s target here? As part of his polemic against empiricist psychology, Köhler argues that ‘sensory units’ (gestalten) ‘existed as units’ before the addition of ‘meaning’, i.e., before acquiring names, rich symbolism, or practical uses; indeed existence as a ‘sensory unit’ is a condition for the possibility of ‘meaning’ ( GP 82). His point is that, pace the empiricist psychologists, gestalten cannot be explained away as the product of learning such meanings. I don’t think that Wittgenstein means this by ‘meaning’ in this context; thus it may be said that this objection to Köhler misses its target. Nonetheless I am inclined to think that he sees the word ‘meaning’ as capturing something important: he wants Köhler to use the word ‘meaning’ more widely than he does, and this is his objection. What does the word ‘meaning’ capture here for Wittgenstein? In part taking my cue from Wittgenstein’s suggestion that there is a ‘connection between the concepts of seeing an aspect and of experiencing the meaning [ Bedeutung ] of a word’ (PI II 214), I submit that ‘meaning’ is what is missing from the lives (PI II 214; cf. RPP I §202, LPP 181f.) of those (hypothetical, in Wittgenstein’s view) individuals who are ‘meaning-blind’, ‘aspect-blind’,16 or ‘gestalt-blind’ [Gestaltblinde] (RPP II §478, also at RPP I §170 where it is translated as ‘form-blind’). 17 Wittgenstein notes that ‘the names of famous poets and compo sers seem to have taken up a peculiar meaning into themselves. So that one can say: the names “Beethoven” and “Mozart” don’t merely sound different; no,
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 17 they are also accompanied by a different character’ ( RPP I §243). (‘It is as if the name together with these works, formed a solid whole . . . The name turns into a gesture; into an architectonic form’, ( RPP I §341; cf. LPP 167).) The ‘meaning-blind man’ ( Bedeutungsblinder), however, ‘would not feel that the names . . . were distinguished by an imponderable Something’ (RPP I §243; cf. PI II 214; RPP II §571). He would be similar to ‘those for whom spelling is just a practical question’, who are insensitive to changes in the orthography of a word ( RPP II §572, cf. Z §184), or who lacks the sensibility expressed here by Grillparzer: ‘I cannot describe the dreadful impression which the h in the English word ghost makes on me’ (quoted in Schulte 1993: 69). Again, ‘normal’ people, when listening to someone reading a poem out loud, will attend to intonation, and will take note if the reader pronounces a word with the wrong intonation so that it ‘stands out too little or too much’ ( PI II 214); if the person is reading the poem himself and gets the intonation wrong, we may say to him: ‘You must hear this word as . . . then you will say the sentence properly’. The meaning-blind man is unable to benefit from this instruction ( RPP I §247); Wittgenstein explicitly compares this to directions for playing a passage of music (cf. RPP I §350). Overall, the impression made by the meaning-blind man might be described as ‘prosaic’ ( RPP I §342). Again, the aspect-blind person is someone who ‘never sees anything as anything ’ (cf. RPP II §478, cf. PI II 213), who can ‘gather various things about the landscape’ from a photograph but cannot exclaim ‘What a glorious view!’ (RPP I §168); we might ‘picture him as making a less lively impression than we do, behaving more “like an automaton” ’ (RPP I §198)—‘as it were sleep-walking’ (RPP I §178). These points, once again, extend well beyond aspect-seeing. Wittgenstein imagines a man with ‘the talent to copy objects . . . very exactly, and yet he might keep on making small mistakes against sense [Sinn]; so that one could say “He doesn’t grasp an object as an object” ’ (RPP I §983; cf. RPP I §423, RPP I §978) (i.e., he is ‘gestalt-blind’).
3. Merleau-Ponty’s Criticisms of Köhler’s Descriptions Despite his praise for Gestalt psychology’s descriptions of the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty charges it with a failure to draw the correct consequences from its own discoveries, and consequently with nothing less than misconceiving the perceived world, the body, and the relations between them.18 I will develop two strands of this critique.
MP1. Persistent Dualisms The issue here has to do with what to make of empiricist discoveries about perceptual experience within what Gestalt psychologists call the ‘analytical’ (as opposed to the ‘normal’) attitude in perception (e.g., cf. GP 47).
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To persuade us that we really do see what they say we see, the empiricist psychologists ask us to attend to what we are looking at in particular ways, often with the assistance of various laboratory techniques and apparatus. So, for example, to ‘show’ that we really see a stack of paper as a multiplicity of shades of grey rather than the uniform white which we claim, or that a circular plate seen at an angle really looks elliptical, they will ask us to squint our eyes or to look at the paper or the plate through a cardboard tube or a hole in a screen. Similar procedures are used to persuade us that a man really does look smaller as he gets further away. This last case also feeds into the perception of depth, distance or relief, which (according to the empiricists) we don’t strictly speaking see; rather, we have learned that a man who looks smaller, whose perception involves less ocular convergence, and between whom and us there are many intervening objects, etc., is further away. Köhler argues that the introspectionist unjustifiably reads the experience we have while adopting ‘the analytical attitude’ into that which we have when taking ‘the normal attitude’ in perception. In fact, ‘the experiences revealed by introspection depend upon the attitude of introspecting. One cannot show that they also exist in the absence of this attitude’ ( GP 52, cf. GP 102, PhP 8, PhP 505 n.26). The Gestalt psychologists rightly insist that we do perceive depth and distance and that perceived sizes, shapes and colours are constant. Yet these factors (so-called visual cues) which are revealed in the analytic attitude (e.g., ocular convergence, apparent size, intervening objects, etc., in the case of distance, the lighting as well as the variety of colours which show up on the parts of the object in shadow or bright sunlight) clearly enter into perception somehow (PhP 269). The Gestalt psychologists don’t take the intellectualist line that we infer depth or constant colour from visual cues; what they say is that these factors ‘are not signs, but conditions or causes’ of the perception of depth or colour, of which we are unaware ( PhP 269; cf. PhP 48). For Merleau-Ponty, the Gestalt psychologists’ consignment of these factors to the realm of ‘conditions and causes’ signals their inability to transcend the ‘either cause or (inferential) reason’ dichotomy (which he sees as part of a more general mind/body dualism). This is where Merleau-Ponty puts ‘motives’: the ‘visual cues’—the ‘motives’ of perception—are meaningful : they don’t function causally, but nor do they function as reasons from which we infer a conclusion. Thus he speaks of ‘the silent language whereby perception communicates with us’, in which ‘interposed objects, in the natural context, “mean” a greater distance’ ( PhP 50). Similarly, the Gestalt psychologists’ inference from ‘not expressly aware’ to ‘unaware’ signals their inability to transcend a correlative dichotomy; here Merleau-Ponty puts the notion of being non-expressly (‘non-thetically’ or ‘non-positionally’) aware of the motives of perception ( PhP 270, cf. PhP 50: these ‘are tacitly known to perception in an obscure form, and they validate it by a wordless logic’). Again, ‘the decisive factor in the phenomenon of colour constancy . . . is the
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 19 articulation of the totality of the field, the wealth and subtlety of its structures’ (PhP 321), including in particular the structure ‘lighting-thing lighted’ (PhP 320). The articulation of the field and the lighting are, not ‘causes’ or ‘conditions’ of colour constancy, but ‘moments’ of the phenomenon of colour constancy and internally related to it via a relation of ‘motivation’ (PhP 322). Thus, what the empiricist psychologists’ ‘analytical attitude’ does is to make us thetically aware of the motives of perception. It is, Merleau-Ponty argues, crucial to normal perception that we are not thetically aware of these motives. We have all seen the play of shadows and the play of light, but in ordinary life, ‘it hides itself in making the object visible. To see the object, it is necessary not to see the play of shadows and light around it’ (SNS 16). Suppose that I look at a table spread with sheets of paper, some of which are in shadow. ‘If I do not analyse my perception but content myself with the spectacle as a whole, I shall say that all the sheets of paper look equally white’. But if I fix my gaze or look at the sheets in shadow through a matchbox lid, that is, disrupt the articulation of the field, they ‘change their appearance: this is no longer white paper over which a shadow is cast, but a grey or steely blue substance, thick and not definitely localized’ ( PhP 234–5). Again, a feebly lighted white wall which in some sense appears white ‘to the unhampered vision’ ‘appears a bluish-grey if we look at it through the window of a screen which hides the source of light’ ( PhP 320); hiding the source of light disrupts the ‘lighting/thing-lighted’ structure, and looking through the screen disrupts the entire articulation of the field, since when we look through the screen we no longer perceive ‘subordinated wholes, each with its own distinctness, standing out one against the background of another’ (PhP 321): in the analytic attitude, ‘we no longer see real bodies, such as the wall or the paper’ ( PhP 320).
MP2. Reconceptualizing the Body Second, Merleau-Ponty argues that the Gestalt psychologists’ descriptions imply a reconceptualization of the body which they never fully undertake.19 To take a particularly blatant example, for them, ‘colour constancy’ comes about because (inter alia) ‘the eye “takes the lighting into account” ’ (Guillaume quoted in PhP 548 n.23). What can that possibly mean without a reconceptualization of the body? Merleau-Ponty argues that to understand perception, we need to be prepared to speak of bodily awareness, bodily knowledge, bodily intentionality, and bodily purpose (even teleology), none of which could possibly make sense within a Cartesian conception of the body. The non-thetic awareness referred to earlier is the body’s awareness, neither explicit nor articulate. The body is aware of itself; for example, it is aware of the convergence or divergence of the two eyes as they rotate in their sockets: ‘perception and experience of one’s own body are mutually implied’ (PhP 522 n.71; cf. PhP 211); it is also aware of the lighting, the intervening objects, etc. These
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seemingly very different ‘objects’ of bodily awareness are brought together in the idea of a ‘comprehensive bodily purpose’ (PhP 101). The two eyes converge or diverge because the body is focusing the eyes on the near or distant object. And focusing is a ‘prospective activity’ ( PhP 241), a ‘purposive’ activity which has an aim: one focuses in order to see the thing . By the same token, instead of my perceiving intervening objects, apparent size, and so on, I perceive a unified object within a total spectacle, and it is the body which ‘brings about [this] synthesis’ (PhP 241). The body’s intentionality is ‘operative intentionality’, ‘that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world’ ( PhP 1xxxii). Thus the thing —the unified thing with constant size, shape and colour, in focus—is ‘the goal of a bodily teleology’ (PhP 337). ‘The thing’ is what gives me the ‘best hold’ (sometimes called the ‘maximum grip’) I can have upon the world (thus one could equally say that ‘maximum grip’ is ‘the goal of a bodily teleology’). The body’s ‘gaze’ is precisely ‘an apparatus capable of responding to the promptings of light in accordance with their sense’ ( PhP 323); it ‘ “knows” the significance of a certain patch of light in a certain context; it understands the logic of lighting’ (PhP 341), and it uses that ‘knowledge’ to aim at ‘a certain “hold” . . . on its surroundings’ (PhP 278). In order to ‘inhabit’ the world, in order to have the best ‘hold’ I can upon it, that world must consist of unified, constant ‘things’, and my body is precisely the power to ‘contrive’ this, to ‘contrive’ the organization of the field: it is ‘the general power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains, the key to all those transpositions and equivalences which keep it constant’ ( PhP 325). Again, it is vital for normal perception (because ‘the natural and antepredicative unity of the world’ is vital for our life) that the body keep its own operations hidden, so that in the normal attitude of perception we see not lighting but things which have their ‘own’ colour (PhP 320). To fix the gaze, as opposed to exploring with the gaze, is to step into the analytical attitude and hence to ‘separat[e] the region under scrutiny from the rest of the field, interrupting the total life of the spectacle’ ( PhP 325). Lighting and reflection ‘play their part only if they remain in the background as discreet intermediaries, and lead our gaze instead of arresting it’ ( PhP 323).
4. Further Reflection on These Criticisms On the face of it, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty are attacking Gestalt psychology from very different angles; but are their views really as diametrically opposed as they appeared at the beginning? Let’s look back at each of the criticisms outlined in the previous two sections.
W1. Two (or Three?) Uses of the Word ‘See’ Merleau-Ponty pays far less attention to ‘reversals’ than does Wittgenstein. 20 Still, as we noted, Wittgenstein’s distinction between various uses of ‘see’
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 21 applies not just to ambiguous pictures but to all perceived objects. Wittgenstein’s distinctions—in particular the distinction between the first and the third uses of ‘see’—invite comparison to the distinction which both Köhler and Merleau-Ponty draw between the analytic and the normal attitude in perception, in particular to the way it is spelled out by Merleau-Ponty. A striking point of comparison is the fact that both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty use painting to get at, in Wittgenstein’s case, the first use of ‘see’, in Merleau-Ponty’s case the analytic attitude. (Remember too that one expresses what is seen in Wittgenstein’s first sense of ‘see’ by a painting or drawing, as opposed to a comparison, or a gesture, etc. See also RPP I §267, §1077.) For Merleau-Ponty, a painter learns to adopt the analytic attitude: he may hold up his paintbrush at arm’s length alongside the distant tree in order to focus on its ‘apparent size’ and to compare its apparent size to that of the farmer in the field. He squints so that the colours he sees ‘are determined by the quantity and quality of reflected light’ (PhP 320). By such means, he makes himself thetically aware of the motives of the perception of distance and of colour constancy; he ‘interrogates’ the mountain with his gaze, asking it to ‘unveil the means’ ‘by which it makes itself a mountain before our eyes’; he finds ‘[l]ight, lighting, shadows, reflections, color’ which ‘exist only at the threshold of profane vision’; and his gaze ‘asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing’ (PrP 166). Wittgenstein makes a number of scattered remarks about painting. Many focus on colour, and in particular on the distinction between what colour something is and what colours a painter would use on the canvas to paint that thing: ‘This paper is lighter in some places than in others; but can I say that it is white only in certain places and gray in others??—Certainly, if I painted it, I would mix a gray for the darker places’ (RC III §56, cf. RC III §171, §244). Here he—like Merleau-Ponty and the Gestalt psychologists— is evidently reluctant to say that parts of the paper are grey (cf. RC III §246, RPP I §442); that one would have to mix a grey in order to paint those parts does not demonstrate that they are, although it does provide a reason—one which an empiricist psychologist might use—for saying so. Again, he repeatedly asks us to imagine a painting being cut up into small pieces, each of which ‘should appear as a flat colour-patch. Only together with the other pieces does it become a bit of sky, a shadow, a highlight, a concave or convex surface, etc.’ (RC III §266; cf. RC I §60, RC III §53). We might say (and some empiricist psychologists would say) ‘that this puzzle shows us the actual colours of the various spots in the picture’ ( RC III §267; RC III §268 clearly identifies this as a temptation that ought to be resisted). It is significant that it took Western painters centuries to discover the motives of perception; as Merleau-Ponty notes, a reflection on the eye, although ‘not seen as such’, makes the face a living face, as painters eventually discovered; without it, ‘the eye remains dull and sightless as in the paintings of the early masters’ (PhP 322). Cf. Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘High-light or reflection: when a child paints, it will never paint these’ ( RPP I §1105).
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Thus it is possible to read both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty not only as drawing parallel distinctions between uses of the word ‘see’ but as saying that a painter must set out to see in the first sense of the word ‘see’ (to adopt the analytical attitude so as to become expressly aware of the motives of perception) in order to get us, the viewers, to see in the third sense of ‘see’.
W2. Seeing Meanings Merleau-Ponty doesn’t explicitly accuse Köhler of failing to recognise that seeing ‘organisation’ is seeing a meaning. Rather, he simply asserts that, as a consequence of figure-ground structure, even a simple black patch on a white background is ‘charged with a meaning’ (PhP 4, cf. PhP 13–14). He regularly characterises perception as ‘physiognomic’ ( PhP 134), so that ‘the object “speaks” and is significant’ (PhP 133). It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein uses this same word ‘physiognomy’ in a linked way: words, he says, have a ‘physiognomy’, a ‘familiar face’ (RPP I §6, RPP I §322, RPP I §328, PI II 181). Even more striking, however, is Wittgenstein’s consideration of the various forms of ‘blindness’: meaning-blindness, aspect-blindness, gestalt-blindness, etc.21 Those familiar with Merleau-Ponty cannot read Wittgenstein’s descriptions of what such a person’s life would be like without thinking of the actual abnormal individuals, especially Schneider, whose experiences MerleauPonty discusses in such detail, as well as the sorts of cases presented more recently by neurologists such as Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Coles. (Recall that Schneider is characterised, inter alia, by the fact that ‘the world no longer has any physiognomy for him’ (PhP 134), except when he is engaged in a familiar task: e.g., he is no longer able to ‘see the meaning’ of a fountain pen, but must laboriously work out what object he is faced with.) Such cases might help us to imagine in more detail than Wittgenstein was able to how aspect-blindness or form-blindness shows up in an individual’s life. 22 Just for example, think of Wittgenstein’s description of the man with ‘the talent to copy objects . . . very exactly’, but who ‘might keep on making small mistakes against sense [Sinn]; so that one could say “He doesn’t grasp an object as an object” ’ ( RPP I §983; cf. RPP I §423, RPP I §978). Wittgenstein does not tell us what ‘a mistake against sense’ might look like (nor does he here mention ‘the sequence, the order, in which we made the drawing’, which in RPP I §1023 was what in a drawing corresponded to the words ‘objectlike’); but readers are invited to have a look at the videos on YouTube of Stephen Wiltshire (a hugely talented and successful young artist diagnosed with autism) engaged in drawing complex cityscapes.23 We might be persuaded, at least by the sequence in which he draws, that he seems to treat the scene before him as a complex patterned mosaic, not as a scene.
MP1. Persistent Dualisms Wittgenstein, like Merleau-Ponty, tackles many dualisms. One imagines that he would be in broad sympathy with Merleau-Ponty’s challenges to
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 23 the ‘reason/cause’ and ‘expressly aware/unaware’ dichotomies; at the same time, there is little evidence that he was aware of these as dualisms in need of challenge. Consider this passage: ‘we often see a distant object merely as distant and not as smaller . . . Thus we cannot say “I notice that he looks smaller, and conclude from that that he is further away”, but rather I notice that he is further away, without being able to say how I notice it’ ( RC III §171). Here he rejects the intellectualist, inferential-reason-giving interpretation of ‘visual cues’, and it is even more evident that he would reject a causal account as well. At the least this leaves space for Merleau-Ponty’s ‘motives’ of perception, yet there is no sign of an attempt on Wittgenstein’s part to carve out that space himself. One might argue that his suggestion that we are ‘unable to say’ how we ‘notice’ distance indicates an incipient conception of our being neither ‘expressly aware’ nor ‘unaware’ of those visual cues, but this is never spelled out. (See also RPP I §443: ‘we are hardly ever conscious of the unclarity of the periphery of the visual field’, cf. PhP 6.)
MP2. Reconceptualising the Body There is nothing in Wittgenstein that remotely resembles Merleau-Ponty’s radical and thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the body. For all that, there are indications throughout of his recognition of a widespread picture of the human body as a mere object or a machine and his eagerness to challenge that picture. To take just one pertinent example, in the context of how it comes about ‘that I see a tree standing up straight even if I incline my head to one side, and so the retinal image is that of an obliquely standing tree’ and the (empiricist) answer: ‘Well, I am conscious of the inclination of my head, and so I supply the requisite correction in the way I take my visual impression’, Wittgenstein remarks: ‘. . . Well, who says that a living creature, an animal body, is a machine in this sense?’ ( RPP I §918). And anyway one could hardly say that ‘[t]he human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (PI II 178) if one were thinking of the human body as a machine.
5. Further Reflections and Concluding Remarks The previous section will, I hope, have demonstrated that Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s responses to GP’s descriptions of the perceived world are by no means as radically at odds as they may have seemed at first sight. But how close are they really?
Reflections on W1 It is easy to argue ‘a priori’ that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty were ‘doing the same thing’ by juxtaposing such Wittgensteinian methodological passages as ‘We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place’ ( PI I §109) with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that phenomenology
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‘is a matter of describing, not explaining or analysing’ ( PhP xxi); but it is also easy to argue ‘a priori’ that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty were not ‘doing the same thing’ because what Wittgenstein describes is language, and what Merleau-Ponty describes is experience. We suggested in the previous section that it is possible to read both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as drawing parallel distinctions between uses of the word ‘see’. And here, the form which the a priori objection will take is that Merleau-Ponty isn’t really interested in uses of the word ‘see’; he is interested in seeing , and conversely that Wittgenstein isn’t really interested in seeing, he is only interested in how we talk about seeing. It seems to me, first, that no such tension made itself felt in our (very non-a priori) discussion; and it seems to me, second, that the idea of such a tension is at least in part a product both of a narrow conception of language and of a narrow conception of experience—a conception which would require the philosopher to focus inwards when attempting to describe experience, and which would make language and experience externally related to one another. Experience: There is a great deal to say here, but I will confine myself to saying this much: that phenomenology is not introspection, and ‘describing experience’ for the phenomenologists requires focusing not inwards but ‘outwards’—that is to say, on the world (the lifeworld, and our being-in-thelifeworld). Wittgenstein, it may be argued, was generally suspicious of the term ‘experience’ because he associated it with a conception of experience, something like that held by empiricists, which saw it as something ‘inner’ and ‘private’. Merleau-Ponty was as critical as Wittgenstein of such a conception (PhP 57–8).24 Language: Again there is a great deal to say here at which I can only gesture, but it is clear that neither author holds such a narrow conception of language, once we reinstate a proper phenomenological conception of experience. Both Wittgenstein’s challenges to the ‘Augustinian’ conception of language (PI 1ff.) and Merleau-Ponty’s challenges to the logical positivist conception of language (PhP xxix) (as well as the empiricist and intellectualist conceptions of word-meaning, PhP 182) are aimed at reinstating an internal relation between language and the lifeworld (‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’, PI I §19). Merleau-Ponty’s description of ‘the meaning of speech’ as ‘the way in which it handles this linguistic world or in which it plays modulations on the keyboard of acquired meanings’ (PhP 192)—here we have ‘a kind of habituation, a use of language as a tool or instrument’ ( PrP 99)—invites comparison to Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we view ‘the meaning of a word [as] its use in the language’ (PI I §43).25 To be sure, Merleau-Ponty is here describing what he calls ‘second-hand’ as opposed to ‘authentic’ speech (cf. PhP 530 n.6), or the spoken word as opposed to the speaking word (PhP 202). (This distinction is not exactly well-drawn in PhP. Paradigms of ‘speaking speech’ or ‘authentic expression’ include the speech of the writer, artist or philosopher (PhP 203), or ‘that of the child uttering its first words, of the lover revealing
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 25 his feelings, of the “first man who spoke” ’ ( PhP 530 n.7). These are very different examples.) That is, whereas Wittgenstein sees ‘use’ (normally for him ‘customary’ or ‘habitual’ use) as ‘life-giving’ (‘Every sign by itself seems seems dead. What gives gives it life?—In use it is alive’, PI I I §432), Merleau-Ponty may seem to be saying the opposite. Yet he is not: after all, ‘speaking speech’ is used —it —it is speech—and in any case, he insists on the dialectical interplay between ‘spoken speech’ and ‘speaking speech’. The ‘acquired fortune’ of ‘spoken words’ required ‘speaking words’ in order to be acquired in the first place, but is also what makes new ‘speaking words’ possible (PhP 203). And although Wittgenstein does not explicitly make Merleau-Ponty’s Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the spoken word and the speaking word, his discussion of the experience of meaning (brought out as W2 above) may be argued to point in the same direction as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘speaking word’. (Remember that the meaning-blind man, he who lacks the experience of meaning, is described as making a ‘prosaic’ impression, RPP I §342; his words, we may say, are spoken rather than speaking.) It does not follow from these remarks that describing language and describing experience are the same enterprise; but it does follow that they are internally related enterprises.
Reflections on MP1 and MP2 We might, however, however, argue that descriptions (be they of language or of experience) have different purposes for Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. (Wittgenstein: ‘this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems’, PI I I §109; cf. ‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’, PI I I §128.) The later Wittgenstein has been read in multiple ways; even those who take seriously the analogies which Wittgenstein drew between his method and psychotherapy differ in important respects. Some see Wittgenstein’s descriptions of the uses of words as his primary task—he aims to construct a complete ‘logical geography’ of language—and his therapeutic moves against various philosophical dogmas and prejudices as subservient to that aim, inasmuch as those in the grip of dogmas and prejudices are apt to misdescribe the uses of words. Others see his primary task as therapeutic, as freeing people of philosophical dogmas and prejudices, and his descriptions of the uses of words as subservient to that purpose, inasmuch as reminding people how they ordinarily use words may make them reflect on what has compelled them to misdescribe that use. 26 Now, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy clearly has a therapeutic purpose too: to liberate his interlocutors from the ‘prejudice of objective thought’; yet arguably his approach is more easily assimilable to the first way of reading Wittgenstein than the second: his ‘therapy’ is instrumental to his primary end rather than being that end. If we (as I would urge) read Wittgenstein in the second way, way, what becomes of our reflections on MP1 and MP2?
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MP1 We noted a general tendency on Wittgenstein’s part to resist dualisms, although he didn’t appear to be particularly sensitive to the ‘reason/cause’ and ‘expressly aware/unaware’ dualisms which Merleau-Ponty picked up on here. Had he been made so, there seems to be little doubt that he would be as resistant to these as to others. What though would be his response to Merleau-Ponty’s strategy? On the one hand, proposing a third possibility that cannot be fitted to either one of the two terms of the dichotomies is an important way of challenging dichotomies; on the other, I suspect that he would see a danger here: that Merleau-Ponty has simply replaced these dichotomies with trichotomies, and that these could become as dogmatically entrenched in our thinking as the original dichotomies.
MP2 Here we noted that Wittgenstein offers, as an alternative possibility, a nonmechanical conception of the body. He thinks of philosophical prejudices as ‘musts’, as blindnesses to alternative possibilities; and a vital therapeutic task is, precisely, precisely, describing such alternatives. 27 One may argue that in order for the therapeutic task to be successfully achieved, it is insufficient simply to moot such an alternative (‘Well, who says that a living creature, an animal body, is a machine in this sense?’); one’s interlocutor needs to be put in a position of seeing the possibility as a real possibility, and that requires just the sort of detailed elaboration which Merleau-Ponty so elegantly provides. Yet it is far from clear that Merleau-Ponty would be content with our seeing his reconceptualization of the body as ‘elaborating an alternative possibility’.
Reflections on W2 At the same time, it hardly seems like a coincidence that the intellectual prejudices against which Wittgenstein did battle were very much those against which Merleau-Ponty fought, and (by the same token) that the conception of the body put forward by Merleau-Ponty was, from Wittgenstein’s perspective, an ‘alternative possibility’ of which Western philosophy and the culture in which it is embedded has largely lost sight. It is commonly said, even in prefacing compare-and-contrast enterprises, that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty are ‘products of the very different traditions of analytic philosophy and phenomenology’ (Marsh 1975: 244; cf. Epstein 1975: 221). However, it may be pointed out that these two traditions have many historical interconnections, and that in any case the very fact that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty were reading at least some of the same works—GP, to mention a pertinent example, as well as some of GP’s targets such as James—implies that their ‘traditions’ overlapped. It may also
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 27 be pointed out on the one hand that Wittgenstein has never sat comfortably in ‘the analytic tradition’ (in part because he resisted all ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’), and on the other that phenomenology for Merleau-Ponty is less an ‘ology’ or an ‘ism’ than ‘a manner or style of thinking’ (PhP xxi), and one that Merleau-Ponty very much made his own. It also seems to me that ‘history of philosophy’ is not the only kind of history that is relevant to understanding a thinker; it is noteworthy that both PhP and PI were were ‘war books’ (cf. Read 2010). GP (like phenomenology) self-consciously grew out of a ‘crisis’: ‘science seemed incapable of dealing with the most significant human problems. Rather than abandoning natural science,’ the Gestalt psychologists ‘ “proposed that the difficulty was not with science itself, but with the current conception of natural science among psychologists”.’ Their reformed conception, they hoped, ‘would do justice to the intrinsic meaning and value in human experience’ (Ash 1998: 2, embedded quotation from M. Henle).28 We may see both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as responding to GP out of a sense of ‘the wretched effect that the worship of science and the scientific method has had upon our whole culture’ (Monk 1990: 404); Gestalt psychology had seen the problem—that is what is so attractive about it for them—but its solution failed to ‘do justice to the intrinsic meaning and value in human experience’ because it remained wedded to being a science. Could this not be precisely the explanation of Wittgenstein’s otherwise rather peculiar insistence that Köhler’s use of the word ‘meaning’ is too narrow—that to see the world from a scientific point of view endangers the meaningfulness of the world, that our culture is in danger of becoming meaning-blind? And does this not no t make sense of the fact that Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Merleau-Ponty’s therapeutic targets were so similar?
Notes 1 A much earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (organised by the Nordic Network for Wittgenstein Research) at the Norwegian Institute in Rome, December 2009; a more recent version at the second Wittgenstein Colloquium at Porto Alegre in Brazil (May 2013). I am extremely grateful to the participants for their helpful comments on both occasions. 2 See, e.g., Ash (1998), especially chapters chapters 3 and 5. 3 Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty scholars divide up their corpuses in various ways. All such divisions are, needless to say, contestable, and I will not enter into the issues here. 4 The best-known names among the Gestalt psychologists are Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. 5 There is some indirect evidence that Wittgenstein Wittgenstein came across GP rather earlier (a lecture by Waismann, with whom Wittgenstein worked closely, which mentions Köhler by name; I am grateful to Matthieu Marion for calling this to my attention), but he certainly did not engage with it in detail until much later. later. 6 Wittgenstein’s written remarks during this period are gathered together as Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology; some of this material was culled
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in Zettel , and Wittgenstein himself gathered some of them into a short manuscript which was originally published as Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. Also of interest are the Remarks on Colour, based on notes written around 1950–51. 7 It would be of equal interest to explore their respective responses to the Gestalt psychologists’ conception of behaviour and critique of behaviourism, but that must await another occasion. Also of great interest would be an exploration of Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Köhler’s doctrine of ‘isomorphism’, according to which ‘in a given case the organisation of experience and the underlying physiological facts have the same structure’ ( GP 177, cf. GP 201), or of how these two thinkers respectively viewed the relationship between philosophy and psychology, but these explorations too must await another occasion. 8 In each case I pick out two linked objections. Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s respective criticisms of Gestalt psychology are both scattered, and not everyone will select exactly the same strands to focus on. 9 He notes that behaviourists often treat such circumscribed units as ‘stimuli’— contrary to their own empiristic assumptions (GP 97). 10 There is a considerable literature on Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-seeing with which I cannot engage here, since my focus is not on aspect-seeing per se but on his criticisms of Köhler; Day and Krebs (eds.) 2010 is an excellent recent collection that explores many aspects of aspect-seeing. 11 The more famous ‘I see that it has not changed and yet I see it differently’ (PI II 193) may mislead us (and did momentarily mislead Mulhall 2010: 255, and possibly Baz 2010: 232) into thinking that the two uses of ‘see’ in this sentence are the two uses which begin his discussion. In fact, the italicised ‘see’ is properly understood as ‘I see that what I see (in one use of ‘see’) has not changed’. 12 In this passage Wittgenstein is actually referring to seeing facial expressions, but it is clear that he would say the same thing about standard cases of ‘aspects’. Wittgenstein’s contrast is regularly between seeing aspects and seeing colours and shapes ( pace Schulte who sees the latter half of the contrast as seeing objects such as trees, 1993: 82.). 13 This argument is treated in more detail in Mulhall (1990: 9ff). 14 Cf. RPP I §868: ‘It is as if one saw a picture: one time together with one group, and then another time with another one.’ The ‘as if’ means: ‘that process might be a representative of the actual one, it would have the right “multiplicity”.’ 15 According to Schulte, ‘the point is that the hypothesis that we can perceive gestalts without giving them a meaning is vague and useless if we are trying to clarify basic concepts like “perceive”, “see”, “feel”, and so forth’ (1993: 83). This seems to me singularly unhelpful. 16 Cf. RPP I §189; cf. also this: ‘the interest here [in the ‘experience of meaning’] does not depend on the concept of the “meaning” of a word, but on the range of similar psychological phenomena which in general have nothing to do with word-meaning’ (RPP I §358), by which ‘psychological phenomena’ I take it he means aspect-seeing and its kin. That aspect-blindness is linked to meaningblindness is clear from this: ‘Anyone who cannot understand and learn to use the words “to see the sign as an arrow”—that’s whom I call “meaning-blind” ’ (RPP I §344). 17 He equates ‘gestalt-blind’ with ‘aspect-blind’ (RPP II §478). 18 Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Gestalt psychology are treated in much more detail in Morris (2012: Chapter 4). 19 They define the body schema as ‘a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a “form” [gestalt]’; adding that this body schema is ‘dynamic’ ( PhP 102) does not correct for the implicit assumption that the body is an object (i.e., a gestalt).
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Gestalt Psychology 29 20 A rare exception is the discussion of the Necker cube; here Merleau-Ponty argues—in an interesting parallel and contrast to Wittgenstein’s suggestion that aspects are subject to the will—that ‘when I focus upon the face ABCD . . . that does not only mean that I bring it to the state of being clearly visible, but also that I make it count as a figure and as nearer to me than the other face; in a word I organise the cube’ (PhP 275), adding that the gaze is the ‘perceptual genius’ here. Wittgenstein too might want to say: not so much that the cube ‘is organised’ but that we ‘organise’ it: see RPP I §1121. 21 Also blindness to the expression of a face (PI II 210). 22 There are issues here which go well beyond the scope of the present essay: what are the advantages and disadvantages of using actual as opposed to imagined abnormal individuals? (Actual cases may be aids to the imagination, as LévyBruhl’s Primitive Mythology was to Husserl’s ‘philosophical imagination’, PrP 90; real engagement with ‘abnormal’ individuals might allow us to treat them with more sympathy than Wittgenstein does [‘prosaic impression’, ‘like an automaton’]; on the other hand, with actual individuals one has to begin with the person and attempt to describe their problem, whereas with imagined individuals the direction of fit goes the other way.) 23 www.youtube.com/user/stephenwiltshire 24 Some of these points are made by Overgaard and Zahavi (2009). 25 See, e.g., Carman (2008: 24); although Romdenh-Romluc does not explicitly mention Wittgenstein, her elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ‘thoughts and their expression’ (2011: 186ff.) will resonate with Wittgensteinians. 26 See Morris (2007). 27 See Morris (2007). 28 Much has been written about the so-called ‘crisis’; an apposite source might be Köhler (1976 [1938]).
References Ash, M. G. 1998. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baz, A. 2010. On learning from Wittgenstein, or what does it take to see the grammar of seeing aspects? In W. Day and V. J. Krebs (eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227–248. Carman, T. 2008. Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge. Day, W. and Krebs, V. J. 2010. Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, M. F. 1975. The common ground of Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of man. Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (2): 221–234. Jastrow, J. 1899. The mind’s eye. Popular Science Monthly 54: 299–312. Köhler, W. 1947. Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology. New York: Liveright. Köhler, W. 1976. The Place of Value in a World of Facts. New York: Liveright (Original publication 1938.) Marsh, J. L. 1975. The triumph of ambiguity: Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. Philosophy Today 19 (3): 243–255. Monk, R. 1990. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Morris, K. J. 2007. Wittgenstein’s method: Ridding people of philosophical prejudices. In G. Kahane, E. Kanterian, and O. Kuusela (eds.), Reading Wittgenstein. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 66–87.
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Morris, K. J. 2012. Starting with Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Continuum. Mulhall, S. 1990. On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects. London and New York: Routledge. Mulhall, S. 2010. The work of Wittgenstein’s words: A reply to Baz. In W. Day and V. J. Krebs (eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–267. Overgaard, S. and Zahavi, D. 2009. Understanding (other) minds: Wittgenstein’s phenomenological contribution. In E. Zamunev and D. Levy (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments. London: Routledge, pp. 60–86. Read, R. 2010. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a war book. New Literary History 41 (3): 593–612. Romdenh-Romluc, K. 2011. Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. Schulte, J. 1993. Experience and Expression: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2
Expression Kathleen Lennon
The parallels between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on expression are most often invoked in the context of both resisting a picture of the mind as an inner private realm and interconnectedly, providing an account of our understanding of, and relationships with, others. Expression, then, is the thread which unravels the distinction between the inner and the outer, self and others. In this context their views are so close that some quotations could come from either writer. These parallels are closest between, for Wittgenstein, Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, Zettel and the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology; and for Merleau-Ponty, the Phenomenology of Perception. It is therefore with the expressiveness of bodily gestures that this paper will start. Despite similarities, even in this area, there are some differences of concern between the two writers. For both, expressions of emotions and thoughts are inter-subjectively perceptible and as expressions, form a potential communicative link with others, which the gesture embodies and initiates. Wittgenstein is particularly preoccupied with the way in which the expressiveness of a face can be seen, with the distinction between physiology and physiognomy, with what anchors our judgments of similarity and differences between faces. Merleau-Ponty, though addressing these issues, is also concerned with the coming into being of expressive sense, the distinction between instituting and instituted meaning, and the way in which gestures manifest the subjectivity of ourselves and others by making manifest the world which we share. His insistence that gestures capture a world, evident in the Phenomenology, is developed and explored throughout his later work. These differences become more marked when each extends the account of bodily gestures to provide accounts of the expressiveness of works of art. For both, the expressive character of art works is neither the projection of the pregiven subjectivity of the artist, nor the imitative reproduction of something external to the work; but instead the creation of a content, a gestalt which can be grasped inter-subjectively and integrated into the practices of a culture. Wittgenstein’s account of aesthetic practices sees them as gaining their sense from the cultural forms of life in which they are embedded. But there is nothing here of the artist ‘ lending his
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body to the world’ (PrP 162) so that it can be expressively accomplished through him, which is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s account. Particularly in his later philosophy (and in passages in the Phenomenology), MerleauPonty develops a philosophy of expression that is without obvious parallels in Wittgenstein, but invites comparison with later writings of Heidegger. Our bodily, linguistic, and painterly practices are viewed as ‘singing the world’ (PhP 193), a shared perceived world that is ‘accomplished’ in our expression of it. I will start, however, with the shared ground.
1. Bodily Expressions For both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, being enminded or having a soul is captured with reference to the expressive body. ‘Expression is not one of the curiosities that the mind may purpose to examine’, says Merleau-Ponty ‘but is its existence in act’ ( S 79). ‘The face is the soul of the body’ ( CV , 23e) says Wittgenstein, for whom the face is always the expressive face, and not simply a part of our physiology. Both writers therefore reject an account of the mind as a private inner realm, for which public expressions are simply signs or reminders from which observers make inferences to the inner realm of others. In opposition to accounts of expression which retain a dualism of the expression and what is expressed, as if what is expressed somehow lies behind its expression, both writers emphasise the direct availability of expressive content. Experiences, sensations, emotions are visible on the body for us all to see. Thus Wittgenstein: ‘consciousness in the face of another. Look into someone else’s face and see the consciousness in it, and also a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, dullness etc.; the light in the face of another’ (Z §225). ‘We see emotion . . . we do not see facial contortions and make inferences from them . . . to joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. Grief one would like to say, is personified in the face’ (RPP II §570). ‘It is possible to say “I read timidity in this face” . . . the timidity does not seem to be merely associated . . . with the face; but fear is there, alive, in the features. If the features change slightly, we can speak of a corresponding change in the fear’ ( Z §376). Merleau-Ponty writes ‘The operation of expression . . . does not simply leave . . . a reminder; it makes the signification exist’ (PhP 188). ‘Faced with an angry or threatening gesture, I have no need, in order to understand it, to recall the feelings which I myself experienced when I used those gestures on my own account . . . I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture, I read anger in it. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself’ ( PhP 190). ‘The smile, the relaxed face, and the cheerfulness of the gestures actually contain the rhythm of the action or of this joy as a particular mode of being in the world’ (PhP 192). Joy, Wittgenstein says, is
Expression 33 ‘neither any inward nor any outward thing’ ( Z §487), an item which can be inspected (first person) or hypothesised about (third person). Joy is a mode of bodily being, and the joyful person is the one whose body manifests joy, a manifestation invoking a response by others (more on this below). 1 Bodily expressions are therefore public and observable, not hidden, though (see below) there are circumstances in which we might find them difficult to read, or we might be mistaken about them. What is involved in the process of perceiving gesture is grasp of a certain kind of gestalt ,2 recognition of a certain kind of patterning of the body as that of fear, or joy or grief. Such a patterning is one we can recognise without paying attention to the material features of the bodies (in Wittgenstein’s case particularly the face) that are involved. As Wittgenstein points out ‘descriptions of facial expressions’ do not consist ‘in giving the measurements of the face . . . One may note an alteration in a face and describe it by saying that the face assumed a harder expression—and yet not be able to describe the alteration in spatial terms’ (RRP I §919). And Merleau-Ponty remarks, ‘The movement . . . is irreducible’ (PhP 191). Moreover the gestalt which is distinctive of particular expressions has woven into it a pattern of movements over time, the broader context and background, and crucially the responses of others. Although Wittgenstein would not use the term, both writers offer a phenomenology of expression; the way bodies are experienced, when taken as expressive. Wittgenstein stresses that the criteria of similarity and difference for expressive bodies are quite distinct from physiological similarity and difference. We are aware of the body in terms of what it expresses. The material shape may only be available to us as, for example , the shape of pain. Different physiologies are grouped together in so far as they are all recognisable as ‘expressing pain’. There may be no way of grouping all the bodily physiologies which express pain without this description. Without the concept of ‘expression of pain’ the group may be shapeless. What we perceive, when recognising expressive content, is not physiology, physical features as captured by scientific categorisation, but physiognomy, ‘face or form as an index of character’ ( Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). This allows us to perceive resemblances across faces which are physiologically very different, and differences in faces, in different contexts, which may be physiologically similar. David Cockburn remarks ‘two faces that, in most contexts, would strike me utterly differently suddenly come together in a way such that I want to say that I saw in each of them just the same reaction to a humorous remark or to a dreadful piece of news . . . the same emotion can find a grip on radically different facial features’ (Cockburn 2009: 132). ‘ “Similar expression” takes faces together in a quite different way from “similar anatomy” ’ (RPP I §1068). In relation to the question of in what way bodies need to resemble each other, in order to be detectable as expressing the same or similar emotions, the answer might just be, that they need to resemble each other, simply, in both being e.g., recognisably sad. There may be no other informative answer. The emotional characterisations here,
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which often find expression in patterns of behaviour over time, have autonomy from the physiological ones, though requiring that physiology to have an anchorage.3 Nonetheless these characterisations are teachable, learnable, and projectable to new cases. Judgements of similarity and difference are made possible by inter-subjective agreement over a range of cases. For these writers understanding expressions is something which we are initiated into within culture. What we are being given with such training is a certain kind of perceptual sensitivity to patterns manifest on bodies over time. Wittgenstein discusses perceiving expressions in the context of a more general discussion of seeing as. ‘Seeing the resemblance of one face to another, the analogy of one mathematical form to another, a human form in the lines of a puzzle picture . . . all these phenomena are somehow similar and yet again very different’ (RPP I §316). He is insistent that ‘seeing’ is the correct word here. ‘ “I see that the child wants to touch the dog, but doesn’t dare”. How can I see that?’ ( RPP I §1066). ‘Do I learn the meaning of the word “sad”- as applied to a face—in just the same way as the meaning of . . . “red” ? No, not in quite the same way, but still in a similar way.’ (RPP I §1071). ‘Is it here as if I were perceiving a “fourth dimension”? Well yes and no. Queer, however, it is not’ (RPP I §1074). ‘ “If you will only shake free of your physiological prejudices, you will find nothing queer about the fact that the glance of the eye can be seen too” . . . On the other hand . . . I should contradict anyone who told me I saw the glance “just the way” I see the shape and colour of the eye’ ( Z §223). Crucial here is both background and context. Behaviour is expressive only as contextualised, only against particular backgrounds, backgrounds which, Wittgenstein points out, are not themselves articulable. It is this context which will distinguish expressions of fear, for example, from mere pretence, engaged in, maybe, for the purposes of explaining what fear is. ‘What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action . . . Seeing life as a weave, this pattern, (pretence say), is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations . . . For concepts are not for use on a single occasion . . . And one pattern in the weave is interwoven with many others’ ( Z §§567–9). ‘ “Grief” describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations in the weave of our life. If a man’s bodily expression of joy alternated, say, with the ticking of a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation of the pattern of sorrow, or of the pattern of joy’ (PI II 174). ‘Pain has this position in our life; it has these connexions; (That is to say: we only call “pain” what has this position, these connexions) . . . Only surrounded by certain normal manifestations of life is there such a thing as an expression of pain; only surrounded by an even more far reaching manifestation of life, such a thing as the expression of sorrow or affection. And so on’ ( Z §§533–4).
Expression 35 The kind of seeing which is involved here, in which the expressive content requires the colours and shapes of the face, and yet transcends them, preoccupied much of Wittgenstein’s writing on expression. It was also a key feature of phenomenological writing. So Merleau-Ponty: ‘Behaviours create significations that are transcendent in relation to the anatomical structure, and yet immanent to the behaviour as such, since behaviour can be taught and can be understood’ ( PhP 195). The expressive significance, which is seen in the behaviour and yet takes us beyond it, is here reflecting a characteristic which for Merleau-Ponty marked all our perceptual encounters. The world we perceive has a meaning for us, a salience and significance which takes us beyond brute sensory givens, weaving into the gestalt the absent and the elsewhere, laden with ‘immense latent content, of the past, the future and the elsewhere, which it announces and which it conceals’ ( VI 114). For him even to recognise an object as red requires an awareness of other actual and possible reds, and to take an impression as that of a continuous thing requires holding onto its past and potential future as well as to the sides which are not immediately visible. Other possible reds are alive in the red which we see. 4 ‘This red is what it is only by connecting up . . . with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation . . . a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive . . . A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution . . . ; a naked colour . . . is not a chunk of hard indivisible being’ (VI 132). These connections are part of the texture of the perceptual experience. In a similar way, the gestalt of a gesture is a movement across time in which a visible or positive presence carries with it expressive depth. In his later work he articulates these features of perception utilising the terms the visible and invisible. The visible, what we might initially characterise as present sensory data, is woven through with the invisible, a sense or salience, invoking the present and the elsewhere, available to us in the visible.5 A recurrent metaphor here is that of pregnancy. The visible is pregnant with the invisible. The invisible is not the non visible. It is made manifest through the visible, so that ‘the animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere. They inhabit those rocky surfaces’ ( PrP 164). Here we are reminded of Wittgenstein’s recognition that the joy is not on the face in the same way as its lines and crevices, but it is not elsewhere either. It is made manifest in those lines. Although all perception involves both the visible and the invisible, for Merleau-Ponty, as for Wittgenstein, ‘the sense of the gesture is . . . not presented to me as a thing’. If it were then ‘it would not be clear why my understanding of gestures should be restricted, for the most part to human gestures’ (PhP 190). At first this remark seems puzzling. He contrasts the understanding of human gestures with understanding the sexual gestures of the dog (which actually don’t seem difficult to grasp) or ‘the beetle or the
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praying mantis’; and also points out the difficulty of understanding emotions of people ‘in milieus too different from my own’ ( PhP 190). These remarks become clearer, however, when we realise that for both writers the expressive content of a gesture is internally related to the response which it invites/requires from others. What response is invited is part of the invisible which we perceive in the visible behaviour. So to grasp expressive content as expressive, we must be engaged. We cannot be detached, for our own responsiveness is required. For both authors, bodily expressions are communicative. Expressions, as opposed to mere bodily reactions, must be able to be taken up, responded to by others. If to see bodily gestures as expressions is to grasp them as part of the weave of life of those whose expressions they are, it is also to grasp them as invitations for a response. To recognise expressive content is to grasp how that expression is woven into a pattern of inter-subjective life. Expressions of pain or grief, in most contexts, 6 prompt responses of comfort and solicitude from others. Overgaard remarks ‘seeing another suffers . . . is recognising . . . something ought to be done’ (2007: 146). Exactly how is the response of the observer tied to the perceptual recognition of expressive content? Wittgenstein sometimes says that the response is one which comes spontaneously or naturally to us. And this can suggest that the link between the pattern detected and our response to it is a causal, and thereby contingent, one. However, what is at issue here is a normative, rather than a causal relation. Whether or not we respond to the pain of another, in grasping that pain is what is being expressed, we grasp that certain kinds of responses are appropriate The expressive shape here manifest in the responses it invites.7 It would be a mistake to regard such recognition as necessarily involving cognitive judgments. For Merleau-Ponty the grasping of such bodily gestalts depends on a reciprocity between other bodies and our own. My body takes a responsive shape during my interactions with others, and the shape it takes reveals the expressive content the body I am encountering has for me. As he points out ‘I do not understand the gestures of others through an act of intellectual interpretation . . . I join with it in a sort of blind recognition’ (PhP 191). For both authors, it is important to understand this interaction properly and not confuse it with an epistemic operation. ‘Communication or the understanding of gestures is achieved through the reciprocity between my intentions and the other person’s gestures and between my gestures and the intentions which can be read in the other person’s behaviour.’ ‘The gesture is in front of me like a question . . . and invites me to join it’ ( PhP 190– 1). To make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about the sexual behaviour of the dog, it seems that the difference is that, for him, the sexual behaviour of the dog and certainly the beetle is not experienced in this way by us. It is not addressed to us, and it is not grasped by our own bodily responsiveness. (Although it certainly seems to be the case that we experience many animal expressions as inviting our responses. Think of a dog’s whimpering or adopting either a threatening or submissive posture towards us. I may
Expression 37 respond by shrinking back or reaching out to stroke and console the dog, especially if it is my dog. Moreover, animals and young children reveal by their responses their grasp of the expressions of others). 8 For both authors this way of experiencing others is distinguished from ‘an epistemic operation’. Wittgenstein famously writes ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ ( PI II §iv). Grasping a gesture as expressive is therefore to be distinguished from a mere description of it in which we are not implicated. It is to immediately recognise the possibilities for us, for our life in relation to the other whose expression we grasp. The reciprocal nature of our expressive perception allows, nonetheless, for the possibility that we might recognise that someone is expressing something we cannot grasp. A central fact in our relations with others is the extent to which they can elude our comprehension, confront us with a subjectivity which is always other to our own.9 There are times when others remain quite opaque to us. We are not able to read their expressions and consequently find our feet with them. Expressions can be ambiguous, and our perceptions of them open to revision and re-evaluation. Both writers draw attention to the difficulties we may have in making sense of people from different cultural or historical contexts. Wittgenstein imagines scenarios in which our inter-subjective practices simply cannot get off the ground. For these writers, however, inference to something supposedly lying behind the expressions will not help. What is necessary is to be able to see the gestures in a certain way—a way that makes their position in the life of the subject, and potentially ourselves, clear. If it is the case that bodily forms are perceived in terms of, for example, the emotion they express, it is also the case that we need such bodily expressions to grasp the emotion in question—just as we frequently need linguistic expression to grasp a thought. Wittgenstein illustrates this with the case of fear: ‘what is fear? What does “being afraid” mean? If I wanted to define it at a single showing—I should play act fear’ (PI II 188e). What we learn, in being taught affective terms, is what counts as a bodily expression of particular emotions. The emotion is characterised as what gets expressed in certain ways: ‘there is no step, after I have learned what anger is, of noticing that anger characteristically finds expression in these ways’ (Cockburn 2009: 127). So we cannot characterise what counts as the relevant bodily features for expressing a given emotion without utilising their emotional characterisation and we cannot make evident what is involved in having a certain emotion without utilising its bodily vehicle. In a parallel way the content of a thought requires its linguistic or bodily expression and does not lie behind it as a package to be simply conveyed to another. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘in the sense that speech expresses thought . . . it is necessary to recognise a primordial operation of signification in which the expressed does not exist apart from the expression’ ( PhP 169). ‘Thought tends towards expression as if towards its completion . . . it is through expression that
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thought becomes our own’ ( PhP 182–3). ‘Speech does not translate a readymade thought . . . speech accomplishes thought’ ( PhP 183). Nonetheless for both writers, it makes no sense to consider a complete expression of a thought or emotion. Our states become more determinate via their expressions. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms the expression accomplishes the thought or feeling but does not exhaust it. New expressions, sometimes in new mediums, can expand our understanding of what grief or fear or sadness is, or may render more perspicuous to us the contents of our thoughts, or more generally, and in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, make clear to us aspects of our existence. ‘The body expresses . . . existence not [as] . . . an external accompaniment of it, but because existence accomplishes itself in the body’ ( PhP 169) in ways which we may not anticipate, but can recognise on encounter. (More on this below.)
2. Singing the World For both writers, what is revealed by bodily expressions is our subjectivity; not as an interiority hidden behind the body, but as a mode of being embodied. So Merleau-Ponty says: ‘A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for me . . . She is a certain manner of being flesh which is entirely given in her walk or even in the simple click of her heel . . . a way of inhabiting the world . . . -in short . . . a certain relationship with being’ (S 54). What marks out his characterisation, however, is that the subjectivity made manifest is a way of inhabiting a world , a world that remains largely implicit in Wittgenstein’s account. Consequently, for Merleau-Ponty, the inter-subjectivity, which expression requires, is an inter-subjectivity anchored in perception of a shared world and expressive gestures reveal characteristics of that world . Grasp of the subjectivity of others and expressive grasp of the world are interdependent: ‘I communicate . . . with a speaking subject, with a certain style of being, and with the world that he aims at’ (PhP 189). Expression is ‘the simultaneous articulation of . . . body and . . . world’. Gestures ‘presuppose a perceived world shared by everyone in which the sense of the gesture unfolds and is displayed’ ( PhP 195).10 In the Phenomenology of Perception, after discussing bodily expressions, Merleau-Ponty says ‘this revelation of an immanent or nascent meaning in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the entire sensible world, and our gaze . . . will discover the miracle of expression in all other “objects” ’ (PhP 203–4). Here he is drawing attention to the fact that we experience the world itself as expressive. The world of everyday experience has a salience and significance for us, a physiognomy or character, which anchors and motivates our responses to it: ‘the object ‘speaks’ and is significant . . . the perceptual field . . . a wave of significance’ (PhP 131). This expressive world is a world for engagement, offering possibilities for our own becoming in relation to it, the salience and significance we see linked, not causally, but
Expression 39 constitutively, to the recognition of certain responses as appropriate to it, to the holding of our bodies in readiness to respond. To experience the world as expressive is not to go back to a view in which the world is regarded as itself a manifestation of consciousness or spirit. The expressiveness of the world is not a manifestation of a consciousness, such as bodily expressions capture. Nonetheless, neither is its expressiveness the result of a projection of significance and salience, derived from conscious subjects and projected onto a neutral reality. As with bodily expressions, to experience the world as expressive is to experience it in terms of a gestalt which weaves together, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, both visible and invisible characteristics, including possibilities for responses of ourselves and others towards it. We experience the world in this way, however, because we are able to express it , finding the world expressive and being able to express it, for Merleau-Ponty equivalent claims, made possible by our embodied anchorage in it. We are able to accomplish, or make manifest, features of our world by gestures, including linguistic gestures of our own; such gestures offering to ourselves and others a physiognomy of things. This, however, is not an act of a constituting subject, but of an expressive one: ‘I am able . . . being connatural with the world, to discover a sense in certain aspects of being, without having myself endowed them with it through any constituting operation’ (PhP 217). The capacity for expression, that is for bodily gestures which make manifest, to ourselves and others, aspects of our shared world, is one of our fundamental carnal possibilities. ‘Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them’ ( PrP 164). ‘Things . . . arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence’ (PrP 164). What is offered is a world which comes into focus alongside us, by means of creative expressive acts, whose disclosiveness rests on their being able to be recognised and taken up by others. 11 Our expressions, linguistic or otherwise, are not operating as signs, to draw attention to a world whose characteristics are determinate independently of our expressive relations to it. Rather our gestures draw our attention to a shared world which is such that it can be expressed in this way, accomplished, as he says, through us: ‘words, vowels, and phonemes . . . so many ways of singing the world’ (PhP 193). For Merleau-Ponty the initiation of expressive content is a central focus of concern. An ‘initiating gesture- gives a human sense to the object for the first time’ ( PhP 200). It is such initiation that offers us insight into the nature of expression itself, and into the way in which a capacity for expression distinguishes our mode of being in the world. ‘All perception, all action which presupposes it . . . every human use of the body is already primordial expression, the primary operation which first constitutes signs as signs . . . -inaugurates an order and founds an institution or tradition’ ( S 67). In the Phenomenology of Perception, and more explicitly in later works, he returns time and again to the opening of signification, the creative origin of
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expressive communication, which makes expression possible. Expressions require a background of already established ( instituted ) gestures or forms of speech, which lie behind them as a condition of their possibility, but they also require an originating creative ( instituting ) moment, in which meaning takes hold, signification becomes actualised. He says in the Phenomenology, talking about speech but making it clear that this applies to expressions of all kinds, ‘constituted speech, such as it plays out in everyday life, assumes that the decisive step of expression has been accomplished’ ( PhP 189), and this requires that we ‘rediscover the primordial silence beneath the noise of words . . . and describe the gesture which breaks this silence’ ( PhP 190). An initiating gesture then brings into view an aspect of the world, makes it accessible to ourselves and others. This gesture is a creative one; its expressive possibility resting on it finding a public, on it succeeding as an act of communication. The necessity of creative initiating acts applies to all kinds of expression for Merleau-Ponty, including bodily expressions, where his account shares many features with Wittgenstein’s. For Wittgenstein, the basis for our expressive encounters is anchored in our primitive reactions: crying out in pain, responding to a smile with a smile, reaching out to comfort. On these our more complex inter-subjective responses are built. But there is much that is common between the two writers. As noted above, Merleau-Ponty stresses the ‘blind recognition’ with which we respond to others, (and to the world). But such a ‘primitive’ response can nonetheless form an instituting act on which later responses build. For both writers, this depends on it being recognised and taken up by others.12 For Merleau-Ponty the way in which an expression is taken on by others is a creative taking up. Not even when we are re-employing instituted expressions is there a simple repetition of gestures. Each expression manifests both creation and repetition and is both indebted to an instituted practice and an opening towards an indeterminate future. 13 For Merleau-Ponty this initiating expressive process is illustrated particularly with reference to language (the subject of a separate paper in this volume),14 works of art (see next section), and perhaps surprisingly, geometry. In the Phenomenology, he discusses a demonstration by a geometer of the characteristics of a triangle ( PhP 404–7). This demonstration he suggests is not reached via a logical definition of ‘triangle’, but by a constructive engagement with a triangle, an extension of its lines (even if only in imagination), which makes manifest its possibilities, ‘a configuration . . . towards which my movements are directed’ ( PhP 405). This is possible ‘because my perception of the triangle [is] not so to speak congealed and dead; the drawing of the triangle on the paper [is] . . . shot through by lines of force, untraced yet possible directions . . . born everywhere in it . . . bursting with indefinite possibilities, of which the construction actually drawn is merely one particular case’ (PhP 406).15 The proof of the geometer is therefore a creation in the face of an initial triangle encountered as open with possibilities. He reiterates this point in a discussion in The Prose of the World , ‘when
Expression 41 I introduce a new line into a drawing that changes its signification’ ( PW 119). These creative acts do not arise in a void but against the background of previous significations which leave open possibilities. The creativity of the geometric proof does not, however, detract from its necessity, ‘relations seem evident to us once the expression is accomplished’ ( S 76). The geometer in providing us with insights about the figure is making evident something new about it, which others, if they follow the demonstration, must also find there. Here, of course, we are reminded of Wittgenstein’s discussion of following a rule in mathematics, where the proof of validity has a similar structure ( PI I §198ff). Wittgenstein, however, does not characterise such rule following as resting on expressive acts or suggest, in the way of Merleau-Ponty, that these acts ‘give us a world to express and think about that envelops and exceeds [our] perspectives, a world that announces itself in lightening signs as a spoken world or an arabesque’ ( S 52). The claim that our expressive acts yield a world announcing itself has a metaphysical ring which Wittgenstein would not endorse. Consequently, for him, although our expressions can be more or less successful, in respect of their succeeding as acts of communication which can be taken up by others; and although they can be sincere or insincere, they are not communicative acts which can be assessed as true or false, disclosive or nondisclosive. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘our expressive significations of the world . . . have a truth: ‘truth which does not resemble things . . . and without any predestined instruments of expression . . . which is nonetheless truth’ (S 57). It is truth if, in a move which here brings him close to Heidegger (1971), the world announces itself in the expressive act. Aspects of it become available to us.
3. The Work of Art The similarities and differences which we find between the two authors become crystallised in their account of the expressiveness of works of art. Wittgenstein discusses the way different parts of our body could become expressive, ‘a friendly mouth, friendly eyes. How would one think of a friendly hand?—probably open and not as a fist- And could one think of the colour of a man’s hair as an expression of friendliness or the opposite . . . We say; “He has a black look,” perhaps because the eyes are more strongly shadowed by the eyebrows; and now we transfer the idea of darkness to the colour of the hair’ (Z §506). ‘Friendly hair’: someone makes use of the expression and others respond to it and take it up and use it. It becomes woven into our inter-subjective practices. The possibility of extending our emotional vocabulary to new bodily expressions also leaves space for the extension of such vocabularies into other areas. We can see the willow tree as sad, the blood hound’s face as sad; and consequently come to see emotion in works of art with differing mediums. ‘The expressive operation of the body’ says Merleau-Ponty, ‘develops into painting and art’ (S 70).
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Both writers firmly reject a subjectivist account of expressive content in art, such that what is expressed depends on the feeling of the artist or, in some accounts, the feelings of the audience confronted with the work. 16 It is quite absurd, says Wittgenstein ‘if you say that an artist wants the feelings he had when writing to be experienced by someone else who reads his work . . . I can . . . understand a poem, [e.g.], . . . -but what he may have felt in writing it doesn’t concern me at all’ ( CV 58e). Nonetheless we can call a work of art ‘an expression of feeling’, but not because it originates in the subjective feeling of its maker. It is an expression of feeling, in itself, as the thing it is (of course a thing in the phenomenal world), anchored in the cultural formation in which it is encountered. Merleau-Ponty also rejects the individualism and subjectivism which leads to an account of style in painting (put forward, for example, by Malraux) as the projection of the personal meanings and values of the painter ( S passim). Style is an inter-subjective quality of the work; its expressive quality, a gestalt, a physiognomy, which reaches out to the viewer and invites a response. It is not something ‘shut up in the depths of the . . . individual’ ( S 53). As such it is not something that a painter could grasp about himself until he sees the pattern manifest in the work he produces. In a way that parallels bodily expressions, expressive quality is a character seen in the materiality of the work of art, but transcending it. So Wittgenstein: ‘Tender expression in music. It isn’t to be characterised in terms of degrees of loudness or tempo. Any more than a tender facial expression can be described in terms of the distribution of matter in space’ (CV 82e). ‘If I say of a piece of Schubert’s music that it is melancholy, that is like giving it a face’ ( LC 4). For Merleau-Ponty the expressive salience is the invisible, traceable in the visible materiality, resonating with a background of instituted meaning and opening a conversation with the future. As with bodily expressions the expressive content of works of art invites/ requires/gives reasons for/responses from those who encounter it. ‘You could say’ says Wittgenstein, ‘that in so far as people understand it, they “resonate” in harmony with it, respond to it’ ( CV 58e). ‘The accomplished work’ says Merleau-Ponty, ‘is . . . not the work which exists in itself, like a thing, but the work which reaches the viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it’ ( S 51). The responses here are not simply causally prompted. As with responses to bodily gestures, they are internally related to the character of the work, that character distinguished by the ranges of responses it invites or motivates. Wittgenstein, in particular, point s out the variety and complexity of our responses to aesthetic objects and the way in which they fit into our forms of life. What he is at most pains to resist is that our understanding requires some kind of inner experience in us. Understanding music can be shown by the way I play it; by the way I move my body in response, dancing, tapping my fingers; by the way I compare pieces together. But it is also shown by the role a piece of music plays within my life, when and where it is played, the kind of occasions it is considered
Expression 43 suitable for. ‘This musical phrase is a gesture. It insinuates itself into my life’ (CV 73). ‘Appreciating music is a manifestation of the life of mankind’ (CV 70). A poem may be read a certain way, with certain kinds of rhythm or copied into notebooks, passed to others, read out at weddings, or just read again and again (LC 4). A piece of china displayed or carefully wrapped and put in a drawer.17 To respond with understanding to some works of art is something for which we may need training. We may need to be persuaded or nudged to see or hear it in a certain way, and thereby to respond. John McDowell describes how such perception can be facilitated. ‘One exploits contrivances similar to those one exploits in other areas where the task is to back up the injunction “See it like this”: helpful juxtaposition of cases, descriptions with carefully chosen terms and carefully placed emphasis, and the like. (Compare, for instance what one might do and say to someone who says “Jazz sounds to me like a mess, a welter of uncoordinated noise”)’ (McDowell 1998: 85). There are also times, with works of art, as with people, when we cannot grasp expressive content as expressive. We do not know how the pieces were woven into the lives of people at the time they were created or how to weave them into our lives now. We may turn to a glossary to inform us of the significance of the items. In Van Eyck’s Virgin and Child ,18 for example, we seek the significance of the parrot in the child’s hand, or the identity of the characters apparently carved into the pillars on either side. Yet a glossary cannot do the job. It assumes that what is expressed by these symbols can be expressed in some other way. Yet there will have been a myriad of ways in which these items were woven into the (religious) lives of audiences at that time. Consequently, we cannot experience their meaning directly. In Wittgenstein’s terms, we are not ‘at home’ with them. We cannot respond to them spontaneously, or with ease. For a fifteenth-century audience, no glossary would be required. They would respond to these items with immediate recognition (rather as those of us raised with Christian iconography might to the presence of a lamb beside a depiction of the Christ child). For both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, it is not possible to separate expressive content from its mode of expression. Such content is fixed neither by its relation to a prior feeling of the artist nor by an imitative relation to a world it is attempting to copy. Wittgenstein discusses the possibility of describing in words ‘the expression of God in Michelangelo’s “Adam” ’ and concludes ‘you can’t at all transmit the impression by words . . . you’d have again to paint’ (LC 38–9).19 Consequently what is expressed is not determinate in advance of the creation of the work of art, but emerges with it. Merleau-Ponty discusses a slow-motion film of Matisse in front of his canvas ‘Matisse . . . looked at the still open whole of his work in progress and brought his brush towards the line which called for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was in the process of becoming’ ( S 45–6). (Such an account can explain then how a painter like Jackson Pollock can drip paint on to the canvas and yet create work which is found expressive
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and able to be taken up within a culture). Merleau-Ponty stresses the analogy between painting and speaking: ‘The case is no different for the truly expressive word . . . The expressive word does not simply choose a sign for an already defined signification, as one goes to look for a hammer in order to drive a nail . . . It gropes around a significative intention . . . [for] . . . a particular word . . . the only possible one if that signification was to come into the world’ (S 46). For Wittgenstein expression is accomplished if a work can be taken up and woven into a form of life. For Merleau-Ponty the work initiates a conversation and opens a field for further creative acts in response. He is particularly concerned with works of art as both advents and continuations. They are advents in that they introduce something and bring a fecundity which suggests many responses, including creative ones. (‘Advent is a promise of events’ ( S 70).) But they also make sense as a response to particular cultural moments, in which other creative acts lie in the background. So when ‘Brunelleschi built the copula of the cathedral in Florence’, he both ‘broke with the closed space of the Middle Ages’ ( S 41) and wrought a transformation which those spaces had left open; and which, in its turn, insisted on a continuation with further expressions (the expression thus both instituting and instituted). Both writers were concerned with judgements in aesthetics, with the artwork as getting something right, but they give different accounts of this. ‘Architecture is gesture’ ( CV 42e) says Wittgenstein, and part of what he means by this has been captured above. It is an intervention, something with a communicable gestalt that can be put to use in our lives. But he also says something more puzzling. ‘Work in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself . . . On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)’ ( CV 24). Here we have a sense of architecture as setting one questions or puzzles; that with the design we are trying to make something clear. This fits with another remark he makes: ‘The queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation (perhaps especially in mathematics) and one in aesthetics. (E.g. what is bad about a garment, how it should be etc.)’ ( CV 25).20 Leaving on one side for this paper what this tells us about his conception of philosophy, what is interesting for our purposes is the comparison between architecture and mathematics. What we are trying to make clear, or get right is, however, something internal to the realm of aesthetic practice. And our judgements may only be articulated in a gesture: ‘You design a door and look at it and say: “Higher, higher, higher . . . oh, all right” (Gesture)’ (LC 13). ‘What does a person who knows a good suit say when trying on a suit at the tailors? “That’s the right length”, “too short” . . . a good cutter may not use any words at all, but just make a chalk mark and later alter it’ ( LC 5). The link with mathematics here echoes his discussion of rule following in other places, with the correctness of our moves, in both, resting on gaining the recognition of an informed audience; an audience who may well have needed training. What is not needed to legitimate the moves are references to something outside of the practice,
Expression 45 something which our buildings or formulae either do or do not manage to capture. The work of art is its own kind of thing. It is not significant because it reveals something about a different reality. But of course, in so far as our aesthetic practices are woven into our wider forms of life, they point to and get anchorage in this wider environment, which they require to make sense. For Merleau-Ponty the work of art continues the expressive operations of the body in breaking the silence of the world: ‘the quasi eternity of art is of a piece with the quasi eternity of incarnate existence; . . . the use of our bodies and our senses, in so far as they involve us in the world’ ( S 70). ‘There is no choice to be made between the world and art . . . for they blend into one another’ (S 48). He pays most attention to the practices of painting, in so far as they concern and make manifest the visibility and invisibility (in the sense of what is in visibility) of the world. ‘It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into painting’ ( PrP 162). Merleau-Ponty is not here concerning himself with a purely figurative art, sometimes viewed as trying to reproduce on canvas something bearing a relation of similarity to the observed scene. Art for him, figurative or not, is not imitative, the artist does not ‘appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it . . . he opens on to the world’ (PrP 162), and by lending his body makes evident a physiognomy of existence. What art is bringing to expression is the salience and significance of the world we encounter, of colour and of space, drawing our attention to the possibilities of a line. Although he returns time and again to Cezanne, and his workings and reworking of the way a perceived scene comes into focus for us as a world of things; he also engages with colour in the work of Matisse and the line in Klee: ‘as Klee said the line no longer imitates the visible; it “renders visible,” it is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Perhaps no one before Klee had let a line muse’ (PrP 183). Art does not describe or depict an already determinate reality, but as with other expressive gestures, brings a world into focus, opening, a ‘hollow’ or ‘fold’ in existence. Again Merleau-Ponty’s thinking echoes that of Heidegger (1971), and although he does not talk of art as disclosive or unconcealing, art, along with other expressive gestures, is capable of a truth in a way that is similar to this Heideggerian picture. It is accomplishing the world alongside other expressive gestures. This is what distinguishes his account from that of Wittgenstein. That art offers us a physiognomy with which to approach the perceived world, something in terms of which we can attend to its ‘allusive logic’ (S 57) is not a thought that we find in Wittgenstein. Yet it is striking that in both writers we find a comparison between the work of the artist and that of the geometer or the mathematician; a creativity which is yet accountable. In both we find that the anchorage of the correctness of the judgements made, or of the gestures offered, requires what is essentially the model Kant offers in the Third Critique, in his discussion of beauty: recognition by appropriately trained others. 21 For at the centre of both their accounts of expressions of all kinds is a view of expressions as communications, which are unsuccessful if they cannot evoke recognition.
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For Merleau-Ponty, however, particularly in his later work, expression becomes the key to our ontological status, the intertwining of our bodies with and within a world which we can bring to expression, providing a picture in which the binaries of subject and object are replaced. Such metaphysical claims are not to be found in Wittgenstein, who, nonetheless, carefully delineates our expressive practices to destabilise the grip of the misleading metaphysical pictures, such as the gap between the inner and the outer, subject and world, which Merleau-Ponty is replacing.
Notes 1 There is an important asymmetry here, and for Wittgenstein without this asymmetry there would be no such thing as expression: ‘the subject of pain is the person who gives it expression’ ( PI I §302). The subject of experience is the one whose body is manifesting expressive content. The recognition of, and response to, this expression by another puts them in a different relation to the expressive content. (This provides insight not only into the way in which the person who has the feeling, for example, is to be identified; but also into what it is to be a subject of experience, namely to have an, actually or potentially, expressive body. Further discussion is beyond the scope of this paper). 2 Both writers were reading and responding to Gestalt psychology. See paper by Katherine Morris in this volume. 3 The character is experienced through the physiology; in Merleau-Ponty’s terms the invisible that is seen in the visible, as discussed below. 4 Strawson discusses what is involved in perceiving a dog. ‘To perceive something as a dog, when silent and stationary, is to see it as a possible mover and barker’ (Strawson 1974: 95). 5 This is not to suggest a picture in which we invest brute sensory data with salience or meaning. We do not experience brute data but always salient perceptions; in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, our experience is of the invisible in the visible. 6 David Cerbone has questioned (in correspondence) what direction that engagement must take. If I am, for example, sadistic, then seeing the other as suffering will involve my recognizing that it ought to continue or be increased rather than assuaged or mitigated. That is a kind of engagement, although not a compassionate form. Is the claim here that it is only with the compassionate response that one really sees the other’s suffering? My own thought is that grasping the other as suffering involves grasping the appropriateness of the need for alleviation, whether or not this prompts any desire to alleviate. But this point needs further consideration. 7 There are some parallels here with the way John McDowell sees the content of perceptual experience as providing reasons for beliefs about the world. See McDowell (1996), and also the discussion in McDowell (1998), chapter 3. 8 Thank you to David Cerbone for this point. 9 Cf. Overgaard (2007). 10 This is not simply the point that emotions, for example, are about things, are intentionally directed at a world, it is that the quality of the emotional state is provided by the way in which the world manifests itself. 11 Although, of course, we must also leave room for the idea that there are things in front of me that I do not now see—that do not now awaken anything in me. Thanks to David Cockburn for this thought. 12 A bodily response which does not get taken up remains as that: a bodily response to a situation. Not all of our responses get taken up into expressive practices.
Expression 47 13 For an extended discussion of this point, see my discussion in Chapter 5 of Lennon (2015). Also very useful here is Landes (2013). 14 There is a question as to whether understanding language as anchored in, and itself, an expressive gesture, undermines the distinction between expressive and descriptive uses of language and expressive and descriptive content. MerleauPonty seems to replace this with a distinction between the saying and the said . The saying is the instituting moment in linguistic expression, which can become sedimented into instituted language, the said, which is no longer creative, and in which our own implicatedness in the original gesture is no longer evident. Nonetheless such language in expressing the world rests on a prior instituting moment. 15 See also the discussion in Hass (2008). 16 See Gombrich (1963). He discusses what he calls the ‘parcel post’ model of artistic expression; ‘the artist . . . knows the meaning the red patch has for him within. . . his private world. The idea [is] that all he need do is transform his emotion into an “expressive” configuration and send it across to the sensitive beholder, who will unwrap the parcel and take out the emotion’ (Gombrich 1963: 54). 17 I am grateful here for discussions with Dawn Wilson. 18 Jan Van Eyck, The Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele, 1436, Groeningemuseum, Bruges. See discussion Lennon (2011). 19 Although we cannot replace visual expressive content with some other form, we can manifest our grasp on such content, or encourage others to its recognition by verbal or other expressions of our own. 20 For a discussion of the implications for his view of philosophy see Wilson (forthcoming). 21 In Kant’s account of beauty in The Critique of Judgement (Kant 1987 first part, first book , ‘ Analytic of the Beautiful’), we have an account of the imagination in which creativity comes into play. Rather than bringing a manifold under universal forms, aesthetic comprehension allows a creative apprehension of the form of beauty, recognising a unity within a multiplicity. He argues here that we employ our creativity in seeking the form of beauty, but that its validity depends on it being recognisable by others.
References Cockburn, D. 2009. Emotion, expression and conversation. In Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist, and M. McEachrane (eds.), Emotions and Understanding: Witt gensteinian Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 126–144. Gombrich, E. H. 1963. Meditations on a Hobby Horse. London: Phaidon. Hass, L. 2008. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. 1971. The origin of the work of art. In his Poetry Language Thought , translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, pp. 15–86. Kant, I. 1987. Critique of Judgment . Translated by W. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Landes, D. 2013. Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Lennon, K. 2011. Imagination and the expression of emotion. Ratio 24 (3): 282–298. Lennon, K. 2015. Imagination and the Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge. McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. 1998. Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Overgaard, S. 2007. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl . London: Routledge. Strawson, P. 1974. Imagination and perception. In his Freedom and Resentment . London: Methuen, pp. 82–99. Wilson, D. forthcoming. Giving a good simile: How Wittgenstein compares aesthetic and philosophical enquiry. In G. Tomasi (ed.), Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Art .
3
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading Exposing the Myth of the Given Mind1 Søren Overgaard
According to a widely held view, one of the primary ways in which we make sense of other people is by ‘mindreading’ them. Mindreading, in this context, refers to our perfectly ordinary capacity ‘to identify the mental states of others, for example, their beliefs, desires, intentions, goals, experiences, sensations and also emotion states’ (Goldman & Sripada 2005: 193). Those who believe that we have such a capacity, and that it constitutes one of our most important means of understanding others, disagree about how we mindread: what the most fundamental or common strategies or procedures for reading others’ minds might be. Until fairly recently, two broad proposals were widely believed to exhaust the alternatives. According to the so-called ‘theory theory’ (or TT), mindreaders utilize a rich body of information about mental states and how they are connected with other mental states, with observable behaviour, and with events in the environment.2 Feeding current perceptual or other information (e.g., about another person’s brow-knitting) into the stored information (which, e.g., connects brow-knitting with anger) allows mindreaders to infer what mental state the other is in (e.g., anger). The rival ‘simulation theory’ (or ST) maintains that mindreaders put themselves in the other person’s ‘shoes’ and use their own minds to work out what they would do, think or feel in the other’s situation—and then attribute those intentions, thoughts, or emotions to the other person (e.g., Gordon 1986; Goldman 1989; Heal 1995). Simulationists need not maintain that we actively and consciously imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes for the relevant simulation to occur; sometimes this may happen subpersonally and unconsciously, e.g., by activation of socalled ‘mirror neurons’ in our brains (see Gallese & Goldman 1998). 3 Recently, however, both TT and ST have come under fire from theorists who maintain that mindreading, at least in a vast range of cases, involves neither theorizing nor simulating. Instead, they maintain, we may immediately and directly see or hear—that is, perceive—that others are in whatever mental states they are in, and so have no need for extra-perceptual cognitive operations of either the TT or the ST variety. Call the view in question ‘perception theory’ (or PT). Something like PT has been defended by, among others, Dan Zahavi (2011), Vasu Reddy (2008), Matthew Ratcliffe (2007), and above all, Shaun Gallagher, whose views I’ll be discussing in this
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chapter.4 Advocates of PT often emphasize that their views were anticipated by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty (Gallagher 2008a: 538, 2008b: 167; Gallagher & Zahavi 2008: 184–5). While there is a lot of truth in such claims, as we shall see, my main aim in this paper is to show that Merleau-Ponty and (at least indirectly) Wittgenstein also expose a fallacy that seems to underlie at least some of the standard PT criticisms of ST and TT. The fallacy in question involves subscribing to what I shall call ‘the Myth of the Given Mind’. I argue, in other words, that a survey of some of the things Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein have to say about mindreading reveals that their PT heirs, in arguing against TT and ST, often embrace a deeply problematic line of thought. The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, I briefly present some of Gallagher’s criticisms of (personal-level, conscious versions of) TT and ST. In section 2, I show that there is good reason to think that Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein would be sympathetic to PT, and that they would share most of Gallagher’s reservations vis-à-vis TT and ST. In section 3, I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein at the same time help to expose a fallacious line of thought implicit in Gallagher’s response to TT and ST. Finally, in the concluding section, I reply to two objections to my critique of Gallagher.
1. Gallagher Versus Hidden Minds TT and ST are rival theories about how we mindread. While TT attributes theoretical inferences to mindreaders, ST maintains that we use our own minds to model or simulate what others might be thinking, feeling or intending. Advocates of PT, however, maintain that both accounts are problematic, and for at least partly overlapping reasons. TT, it is sometimes maintained, seems phenomenologically implausible: when confronting someone exploding in a fit of rage, does it really seem to you that you need to connect some emotionally neutral perceptual input involving knitted brows, flushed cheeks, and shaking fists with stored general information about the emotion such behaviour is usually associated with, before you are able to detect the person’s anger? Hardly, the defender of PT maintains. Nor does ST fare any better. It does not seem to you that you need to imagine yourself in the angry person’s shoes, or simulate his or her behaviour, in order to figure out what such behaviour could mean. Rather, in at least a range of everyday situations it seems immediately evident to you that the person is angry. Enter Perception Theory: In the sort of case under consideration, you neither simulate nor theorize because there’s no need for such things. You see (and hear) that the person is angry. This is information your perception already makes available to you; no extra-perceptual cognitive operation is called for. As we will see later, defenders of PT are right to view Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein as important forerunners, both when it comes to the sketched criticisms of ST and TT, and when it comes to the general outline of a positive alternative.
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 51 Why do advocates of TT and ST overlook this alternative option? According to PT, they do so because they subscribe to a set of assumptions, the upshot of which is that the PT alternative isn’t a real option. In Shaun Gallagher’s recent formulation, the assumptions in question are these:
Hidden minds: The problem of social cognition is due to the lack of access that we have to the other person’s mental states. Since we cannot directly perceive the other’s beliefs, desires, feelings, or intentions, we need some extra-perceptual cognitive process (mindreading or mentalizing by way of theoretical inferences or simulation routines) that will allow us to infer what they are. (Gallagher 2012: 188)
Hidden Minds seems to be an argument. 5 Let us try to identify the argument’s premises and conclusion. First, there is the assumption that the mental states of others are inaccessible to direct perception. Call this the ‘imperceptibility thesis’. The imperceptibility thesis is said to ground the conclusion that mindreading must crucially rely on extra-perceptual cognitive resources of an inferential (TT) or simulative (ST) sort. Call this conclusion the ‘mentalizing thesis’. Before taking a closer look at the structure of the argument, we need to get clear on what the imperceptibility and mentalizing theses actually state. Consider the imperceptibility thesis first. What is the claim that we cannot directly perceive another’s mental states a claim about? Is it a claim about perception (e.g., about the sort of objects or ‘contents’ perceptual experiences can and cannot have)? Or is it a claim about the sorts of things mental states are (e.g., that they are ‘inner’ and unobservable, as opposed to the observable, outward behaviour)? Many things Gallagher writes suggest that he thinks the latter. The imperceptibility thesis, he writes, is the view ‘that intentions and feelings are not things that can be seen. They are mental states . . . that are hidden away (imperceptible) in the other person’s mind’ (Gallagher 2008a: 539). Its advocates defend ‘the Cartesian idea that other minds are hidden away and inaccessible’ (Gallagher 2008b: 164). In fact, if this interpretation of the imperceptibility thesis is correct, Gallagher is right to think the thesis is widely subscribed to in the mindreading literature. 6 Here is a representative sample of quotes (many more could be adduced): [Children’s theories of mind] involve appeal to abstract unobservable entities. (Gopnik & Wellman 1995: 234) Unlike behaviorists, normal adults attribute to one another . . . unobservable internal mental states, such as goals, thoughts, and feelings, and use these to explain and predict behavior. (Saxe et al. 2004: 88)
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Søren Overgaard How do [people], or their cognitive systems, go about the task of forming beliefs or judgments about others’ mental states, states that are not directly observable? (Goldman 2012: 402)
Defenders of TT and ST may not agree on what it is about the nature of mental states that makes the mental states of others hidden or unobservable. Many advocates of TT seem to associate mental states with abstract, theoretical entities or ‘constructs’ of the sort postulated in scientific theories; other theorists seem to regard them (in this respect continuing a venerable philosophical tradition) as ‘internal’ and ‘private’ states, directly accessible only to their owner. But the imperceptibility thesis is a negative thesis: it simply states that whatever mental states are, they are not the sort of thing that can be perceived (at least by anyone but their owner). And Gallagher seems right in suggesting that many advocates of TT and ST agree on at least this much. If the imperceptibility thesis is about mental states not being the sort of thing that is observable, then the Hidden Minds argument should be interpreted as maintaining that because mental states are like that, we need extra-perceptual processes along the lines suggested by TT or ST in order to mindread. That this is how Gallagher himself understands the argument seems to be confirmed by an earlier formulation of Hidden Minds. Gallagher writes: Note first that for TT and ST, some extra-perceptual cognitive elements seem to be required because of the way the problem is framed. In the standard versions of TT and ST . . . [t]he supposition is precisely that the other person’s mental states are hidden away and are therefore not accessible to perception. I cannot see into your mind; hence I have to devise some way of inferring what must be there, based on evidence that is provided by perception. (Gallagher 2008a: 536) It is, then, because TT and ST conceive of the mental states of others as ‘hidden away’ that those states are regarded as ‘not accessible to perception’, and it is for this reason inference or simulation is needed in order to read another person’s mind. Again, if this is indeed the argument Gallagher means to be attributing to advocates of TT and ST, he seems justified in doing so (again, many similar quotes could be adduced): One of the most important powers of the human mind is to conceive of and think about itself and other minds. Because the mental states of others . . . are completely hidden from the senses, they can only ever be inferred. (Leslie 1987: 139)
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 53 . . . mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are private, internal, and not observable in others. However, such states are theoretically anchored in other relevant constructs. Thus, we infer others’ beliefs and desires . . . from, among other things, perceptual experience . . . physiological history . . . and emotional expressions and reactions. (Wellman 1990: 107) Mental states, and the minds that possess them, are necessarily unobservable constructs that must be inferred by observers rather than perceived directly. (Johnson 2000: 22)
Hidden Minds, then, on the interpretation we have given of it, seems to be a line of thought that at least a fair number of advocates of TT and ST subscribe to.7 Its conclusion—the mentalizing thesis—seems to exclude PT as an account of mindreading. How, then, should a proponent of PT respond to the argument? One possible response is to question the structure of the argument: is there any good reason to think the mentalizing thesis follows from the imperceptibility thesis? The argument looks like this: P. (IT) mental states are imperceptible objects. C. Hence (MT) we can only ever infer (or simulate) their presence in other people. It is not obvious that C follows from P. For one thing, it doesn’t follow from the fact that X is strictly speaking invisible that one cannot see (as opposed to infer) that X is present. Dretske (1973) imagines a breed of aliens that can make themselves invisible only at the cost of creating a strong magnetic field around their bodies. In this sort of scenario, one might visually detect the presence of an invisible alien by the paperclips and butter knives that fly across the room to outline a moving space-alien gestalt. Less speculatively, it could be the case that, although mental states are strictly speaking not perceptible, there could be something like what Reid calls ‘acquired perception’ of their presence. 8 Perhaps, over time, one acquires enough familiarity with the patterns of outward behaviour to which, say, anger gives rise to no longer need to infer that another person is angry. Perhaps one then simply ‘sees’—in a perhaps somewhat attenuated or metaphorical sense—that another person is angry; no inferences or simulation exercises need be involved. It has been argued that something like this may happen with respect to theoretical entities in natural science (Lavelle 2012); so why couldn’t it happen in the case of another’s mental states? Gallagher, however, does not question the structure of the argument as such. His response, rather, is to reject the imperceptibility thesis. Gallagher’s PT ‘rejects . . . the Cartesian idea that other minds are hidden away’ (Gallagher 2008b: 164). We can regard the mental states of others as ‘normally and frequently apparent in their embodied and contextualized behaviors, including
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their vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze, and situated postures’ (Gallagher 2012: 188), rather than hidden ‘behind’ such behaviours. Importantly, Gallagher suggests that doing so removes the explanandum of mainstream mindreading research. It was supposed that we needed some extra-perceptual cognitive element because the mental states of others were hidden and unobservable, and TT and ST were rival accounts of what that element consisted in. But if the imperceptibility thesis is rejected, then there is no need for an extra element, and so there is no need for anything like TT and ST. As Zahavi and Gallagher put it (with respect to TT in particular), Theory theory argues that the mental life of others is invisible . . . Supposedly the theory theory account has been developed in order to explain a certain cognitive achievement, namely the move from the perception of observable behavior to the attribution of unobservable mental states . . . If in contrast, we concede that there is no move from the perception of behavior to the attribution of mental states, but that we rather perceive the mental life of others directly, we have . . . changed the explanandum radically. (Zahavi & Gallagher 2008: 239) And by changing the explanandum in this way, we have rendered TT and ST irrelevant. They were, after all, rival accounts of the extra-perceptual element in mindreading, and such an element was thought to be needed because of the imperceptibility thesis. PT, however, rejects precisely this thesis. To be precise, Gallagher’s claim is not that TT and ST accounts are now without any relevance whatsoever. Rather, these types of accounts may still be needed to account for mindreading in relatively rare cases where, for whatever reason, someone’s mental states are not apparent in his or her behaviour. Normally, there is no puzzle to solve, no inference to make, since everything is just out there and obvious. Perhaps, if . . . [e.g.] people were acting in an odd way that didn’t match their words, or were saying odd things that did not match their actions, we might have to resort to folk psychology or to simulation in order to formulate some inference and to piece it all together. These, however, are relatively rare or specialized cases where some version of TT or ST or some hybrid theory might have some relevance. (Gallagher 2008b: 165) To sum up Gallagher’s line of thought, TT and ST are rival accounts of the extra-perceptual cognitive element in mindreading. There must be such an element, many proponents of TT and ST seem to think, because mental states just aren’t the sort of thing that can be seen or heard. If, however, we reject that assumption—the assumption I’ve called the imperceptibility
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 55 thesis—then we render TT and ST irrelevant as theories about how we mindread (at least in ordinary cases). In the next section, I show that Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein would be sympathetic to PT, and to much of Gallagher’s criticism of TT and ST.
2. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein Versus Hidden Minds It seems clear that Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein would agree with Gallagher that neither TT nor ST offers an adequate account of paradigmatic ordinary cases of mindreading. At least, they would question TT and ST accounts of ordinary emotion detection. To take Wittgenstein first, he seems to distance himself from a TT type of account in the following wellknown passages: In general I do not surmise fear in him—I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside; rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I were seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own. (RPP II §170) “We see emotion.”—As opposed to what?—We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.—Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. (RPP II § 570; cf. Z §225) Wittgenstein’s worries about inferential models seem to echo PT’s insistence on the phenomenological implausibility of TT: it simply does not seem to us that we need to make an inference from seen facial contortions to the emotion someone else is feeling. Rather, we immediately see the person as angry or sad. Thus, ‘it is only when we cannot read the outer that the inner seems to be hidden behind it’ ( LW II 63), and inferences consequently seem to be called for. For the same reason, Wittgenstein would not be prepared to accept a simulationist account either, as the following famous quote makes clear: Consciousness in the face of another. Look into someone else’s face and see the consciousness in it, and also a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, dullness etc. The light in the face of another. Do you look within yourself , in order to recognize the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast. (And what does one want to say? That someone else’s face stimulates me to imitate it, and so that I feel small movements and muscular tensions
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Søren Overgaard on my own part, and mean the sum of these? Nonsense! Nonsense,— for you are making suppositions instead of just describing. If your head is haunted by explanations here, you will neglect to bear in mind the facts which are most important.) (RPP I §927; cf. Z §220)
According to Wittgenstein, then, fear, joy, grief, and so on, can be immediately perceptible in human facial expressions (cf. RPP I §1070). There is no gap between the ‘external’ face and the ‘internal’ mental phenomenon, which must be bridged by means of inferences or simulation exercises. Merleau-Ponty seems to press similar points. Contra the thesis that we use our emotional resources to model or simulate another’s emotion—as ST would maintain—Merleau-Ponty writes: Modern psychology has . . . shown that the spectator does not look within himself or within his inner experience for the sense of gestures he witnesses. Consider an angry or threatening gesture. In order to understand these gestures, I have no need of recalling the feelings I experienced while I myself performed these same gestures. (PhP 190) Rather, I simply ‘perceive the other’s grief or anger’, and I do so ‘without any borrowing from an “inner” experience of suffering or of anger’ (PhP 372). Nor would Merleau-Ponty be prepared to endorse a TT type of account, and for similar reasons: ‘Similarly, I do not understand the other person’s gestures through an act of intellectual interpretation’ ( PhP 191). Indeed, in quite the same way as Gallagher, Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that simulation or theoretical inference ‘can certainly provide a guide in the methodical knowledge of others and when direct perception fails, but they do not teach me about the existence of others’ ( PhP 368); nor, we might add, would they be my default ways of detecting others’ emotions. So Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are unified in denying that simulationist and inferential models are adequate for at least a range of paradigmatic cases of everyday mindreading. They also seem to agree that what I have termed the ‘imperceptibility thesis’ is false. This is very clear in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. In Sense and Non-Sense, for example, he writes: We must reject that prejudice which makes ‘inner realities’ out of love, hate or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness: the person who feels them. Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them. (SNS 52–3)
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 57 In line with Gallagher, what Merleau-Ponty recommends is that we do not conceive of mental phenomena such as anger as ‘hidden’, ‘inner’ phenomena, but rather view them as extending all the way to the perceivable bodily behaviour.9 In the case of anger, for example, the angry gesture ‘ does not [merely] make me think of anger, it is the anger itself’ ( PhP 190). The person’s anger is not something that ‘takes place in some otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man. It really is here, in this room and in this part of the room, that the anger breaks forth’ (WP 63). A similar message emerges, though somewhat more ambiguously, in the writings of Wittgenstein. In the Philosophical Investigations, he famously claims that ‘If one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul’ (PI I §357). This is not just a point about the mind or ‘soul’ as such, but applies to specific psychological states as well. For example, ‘One sees sadness insofar as one sees a person’s sad facial expression’ ( LW I §769). In saying such things, Wittgenstein’s point is ‘not that the inner is something outer’ (LW II 61), that is, that the mental simply is outward bodily behaviour.10 Rather, his point is merely to deny that the mind and mental phenomena must be thought of as essentially ‘hidden’ behind bodily behaviour (see LW II 35), to which it is merely externally connected. Rather, the mental is paradigmatically expressed in outward behaviour (LW I §947; LW II 68), where the notion of expression must be understood as involving a ‘logical’ and not merely empirical connection between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ ( LW II 63–4).11 People may of course conceal their thoughts, feelings, and emotions (PI I §391). But this is precisely something that we do, and ‘that means that it is not a priori they are always hidden’ ( LW II 35). This is not the place to go into the details of Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s views. What matters in the present context is merely that they would seem to share Gallagher’s reservations vis-à-vis the types of accounts of mindreading offered by advocates of TT and ST, and that they agree with Gallagher in rejecting what I’ve termed the imperceptibility thesis. Now Gallagher, as we saw, seems to think that rejecting that thesis is sufficient to render TT and ST accounts of mindreading—appealing, as they do, to extra-perceptual cognitive operations—irrelevant save for relatively rare cases where people effectively manage to completely conceal their emotions (etc.), or simply behave in odd and indecipherable ways. Is this also a thought we can find in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein? The answer, quite explicitly as far as the former is concerned, and implicitly in the case of Wittgenstein, is negative, as we shall see in the next section.
3. The Myth of the Given Mind According to Merleau-Ponty, rejecting the imperceptibility thesis does not get us very far. A fortiori, it does nothing to undermine an inferential account of mindreading along the lines suggested by TT. Immediately after stating
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that the angry gesture ‘is the anger itself’ (i.e., immediately after rejecting the imperceptibility thesis) Merleau-Ponty writes: And yet, the sense of the gesture is not perceived like, for example, the color of the rug. If it were presented to me as a thing, then it would not be clear why my understanding of gestures should be restricted, for the most part, to human gestures. . . . I do not even understand emotions in primitive people, or in milieus too different from my own. . . . The sense of the gestures is not given but rather understood, which is to say taken up by an act of the spectator. The entire difficulty is to conceive of this act properly and not to confuse it with an epistemic operation. (PhP 190) This passage contains a number of important points. First, even if the gesture is anger made visible, and so even if anger is something that is straightforwardly perceivable and observable, it does not follow that the emotional meaning of the gesture is ‘given’ to one when one sees the gesture (and thus sees the other’s anger). If this is not immediately obvious, consider a complex physical object such as a smartphone. Presumably, smartphones have yet to reach all corners of the world, so there ought to be people somewhere who as yet have no idea what a smartphone is. Smartphones are obviously visible, and a person unfamiliar with them can still see them. (To think otherwise, as Dretske writes somewhere, is to confuse ignorance and blindness.) Yet, whereas it would be immediately obvious to the average youngish Western European that the object seen was a smartphone, someone unfamiliar with smartphones would presumably wonder what sort of object they are looking at. Even though something is perfectly visible, then, it clearly doesn’t follow that its meaning or significance (or the kind of thing it is) is visible in the same way.12 So, even if the imperceptibility thesis is false, and some mental states are not hidden, but somehow ‘embodied’ in observable behaviour, it only follows that those mental states can be seen (or heard). That is to say, it only follows that we can see (or hear) what is in fact someone else’s mental state. But that leaves the question concerning mindreading unanswered: how do we recognize what we see as another’s mental state? To think that, once the imperceptibility thesis has been rejected, there is no such further question, to which TT or ST could plausibly provide answers, is to subscribe to what I’ll call ‘the Myth of the Given Mind’. According to this myth, once the mental states of others are conceived of as perceptible, it follows that they are given to a perceiver as the mental states they are. This is a myth, as it is clear that nothing of the sort follows. Nor does Merleau-Ponty suppose otherwise. Remember, he states that the angry gesture is anger, and so he clearly rejects the imperceptibility thesis. And yet the meaning of the gesture is, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘not given but rather understood’, and that means we still need an account of how
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 59 we understand it. Have TT and ST been ruled out as potentially correct accounts of how we grasp the meaning of the seen gesture? Not according to Merleau-Ponty, for as the quote continues, ‘the entire difficulty’ is to give an account of our act of grasping that does not conceive of the latter as ‘an epistemic operation’. Nor is it clear how TT and ST could be ruled out, just by rejecting the imperceptibility thesis. For example, it is hard to see why it couldn’t be general information about the characteristic behaviour of angry people that enabled us to grasp the meaning of the gesture, as a defender of TT might suggest. If so, rejecting the imperceptibility thesis gets us precisely nowhere in terms of rendering TT or ST irrelevant. Wittgenstein makes at least partly identical points. He, too, observes that our ability to understand another’s expressions of emotions depends on a number of things, such as belonging to the same culture, or knowing the person well. Chinese gestures, he states, may be as difficult for Europeans to understand as Chinese sentences ( Z §219). ‘I wouldn’t know, for instance, what genuine gladness looks like with Chinese’ (LW II 89). And while Wittgenstein is clear that I may see the glance of another’s eye, he is equally emphatic that I don’t see it ‘ “just the way” I see the shape and colour of the eye’ (Z §223). The meaning of another’s gestures and expressions is not strictly given, then, but depends on our ‘power of interpreting’ them in mental terms (RPP I §1106). This need for interpretation has nothing whatever to do with the imperceptibility thesis. We could imagine that other people’s thoughts and feelings were always expressed ‘in Morse code or some such thing’ ( RPP II §563). If so, until I learn the code, those thoughts and feelings would be completely inaccessible to me, despite the fact that, to paraphrase Gallagher, there is a sense in which everything is just out there in the open. We don’t need a ‘mental thing which is hidden’ ( RPP II §564) for other minds to be inaccessible; all we need are expressions, linguistic or otherwise, which we don’t understand. A series of remarks in Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume II, supports this interpretation of Wittgenstein. 13 In order to illustrate the kind of thinking that underlies the idea that the mental states of others are hidden and inaccessible, Wittgenstein imagines ‘that the soul is a face, and when someone is glad this hidden face smiles’ (LW II 83). ‘Let it be this way’, he continues, ‘but now we still want to know what importance this smile . . . has’ (LW II 83). Wittgenstein’s point is precisely that rejecting the imperceptibility thesis does not remove the need for interpreting or understanding what we see. This emerges when he states that ‘the inner smile could replace the outer one [i.e., become visible in the same way as the outer smile is], and the question about the meaning would (still) remain unanswered’ (LW II 83). Where Wittgenstein does not follow Merleau-Ponty is in explicitly acknowledging that rejecting the imperceptibility thesis leaves the attractions of inferential (or simulationist) accounts of mindreading intact. But that is probably
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to do with the fact that he considers such accounts implausible on other, more phenomenological grounds, as we saw in section 3. At best, ST and TT might be plausible as rival ‘historical’ hypotheses about how we might have acquired the ability to perceive the meaning of another’s expressions and gestures.14As theories about how we go about mindreading, however, they are entirely implausible; yet, crucially, it is not the falsity of the imperceptibility thesis that makes them so. Now, given Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the fact that rejecting the imperceptibility thesis does nothing to establish that we can perceive the emotional meaning of an angry person’s gestures and facial expressions; given that they maintain that understanding and interpretation must be involved; and given their insistence that nevertheless something like PT is the correct account of at least a range of everyday cases of mindreading—given all these things, what we urgently need from MerleauPonty and Wittgenstein is an account of how perception can present us with the psychological meaning of the gestures. Although properly addressing this question is beyond the scope of this paper, let me give a few indications of how I think such an account would go, at least in the case of MerleauPonty. (Wittgenstein is trickier in this respect, because of his ‘quietist’ refusal to offer positive philosophical theories.) It is not insignificant that both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty seem to actively employ the metaphor—much criticized by advocates of PT—of ‘mind-reading’. It is, Wittgenstein says, only when I ‘cannot read’ ( nicht lesen können) the other’s behaviour that his mind seems to be ‘hidden behind it’ (LW II 63). And for Merleau-Ponty, ‘I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture [ je lis la colère dans le geste]’ (PhP 190). Anger and pain are things I may ‘read on someone’s face’ ( PhP 25). Indeed, as he says elsewhere, ‘Gestures are expressive in the manner of a language’ ( CPP 446), and thus to grasp their meaning ‘ is to decipher a language’ (CPP 445). Merleau-Ponty, for one, believes this does not undermine the perceptual character of (much of our) mindreading. For even outside the context of mindreading, perception may involve an element of ‘reading’, according to Merleau-Ponty. He thus speaks of ‘the spontaneous method of normal perception’ making the ‘concrete essence of the object immediately readable’ (lisible) ( PhP 133).15 The crucial point is that when we’re accomplished at reading—whether reading a text, ‘reading’ the ‘concrete essence’ of some complex physical object, or ‘reading’ another’s emotion in their behaviour— the ‘vehicles’ of meaning (the printed signs, the knitted eyebrows) in a sense withdraw or become transparent. As Wittgenstein observes, we are sometimes able right away to describe a face as happy or sad, whereas we would be hard pressed to describe its features in purely ‘external’ physical or geometrical terms (cf. LW II 62). The difficulty here is not to get from clearly discernible physical features to hidden mental phenomena, but rather to get from the clearly discernible mental phenomena to the purely physical
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 61 features, which can only be reached by means of a process of abstraction. We need no inference or simulation exercise, then, to get from the vehicles to the meaning, for we are already at the meaning. As Merleau-Ponty writes, presumably intending to capture something that holds also for the ‘language’ of another’s gestures: The wonder of language is that it makes itself be forgotten: my gaze is drawn along the lines on the paper, from the moment that I am struck by what they signify, I no longer see them. . . . The expression fades away in the face of the expressed. (PhP 422) Much more would obviously need to be said about the Merleau-Pontian view to get a clear picture of its commitments, and thus to gauge its plausibility.16 I cannot undertake this task here. Instead, I will conclude by briefly considering two rejoinders to the critique of Gallagher that I have developed with help from Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein.
4. Objections I have accused Gallagher of being implicitly committed to what I’ve called the ‘Myth of the Given Mind’. One might object to this, however, that Gallagher is clearly not committed to any such thing. The burden of Gallagher’s paper ‘Direct perception in the intersubjective context’ (2008a) is precisely to show that perception can be ‘smart’ enough to deliver information about other people’s emotions and intentions. This suggests that Gallagher realizes that rejecting the imperceptibility thesis is insufficient to establish something like DP: what is needed is reflection, not on the nature of the mental, but on the deliverances or accomplishments of perception. And as the title of that paper indicates, and as Gallagher explicitly states in a number of places, the smartness of perception is highly dependent on context. There is, then, no suggestion that the psychological meaning of another’s behaviour is simply ‘given’ to anyone who cares to look, in every type of situation, and so on. I concede all of this. Gallagher’s explicit views have nothing to do with the Myth of the Given Mind. My claim in this chapter has merely been that the way Gallagher construes the consequences of rejecting the imperceptibility thesis—in particular, his idea that such rejection renders inferential and simulational accounts of mindreading irrelevant, save for a few odd cases—implicitly commits him to the Myth. Avoiding such commitment requires realizing that rejecting the imperceptibility thesis gets us precisely nowhere when it comes to marginalizing (or rendering irrelevant) TT and ST accounts of mindreading. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Gallagher seems not to realize this. That leads me to a second objection. I have construed Hidden Minds and the imperceptibility thesis as having to do with the nature of the mental,
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rather than the accomplishments or deliverances of perception. But perhaps Gallagher really intends them to be about the latter, rather than the former. If so, the charge of being committed to the Myth of the Given Mind must be dropped. For if the imperceptibility thesis states that perception cannot deliver the psychological meaning of another’s seen behaviour, and it is the thesis understood in this way that is supposed to necessitate extraperceptual cognitive operations along TT or ST lines, then rejecting that thesis does pull the rug from under the feet of TT and ST. My reply is as follows. If Gallagher meant to say what the present objection has him say, then two remarks are in order. First, some of his formulations of the imperceptibility thesis and the Hidden Minds argument are, at the very least, highly misleading. To speak, for example, of ‘the Cartesian idea that other minds are hidden away’ (Gallagher 2008b: 164) seems confusing, at best, if the ‘Cartesian’ idea in question is supposed to be an idea about perception, rather than the nature of the mental. The same point applies to Gallagher’s talk of the thesis ‘that intentions and feelings are not things that can be seen. They are mental states . . . that are hidden away (imperceptible) in the other person’s mind’ (2008a: 539). Second, on the current reading of Gallagher’s claims, it seems questionable whether they home in on assumptions that are widely accepted among defenders of TT and ST. All but one of the quotes from TT and ST advocates that were adduced in section 2 in support of Gallagher’s claim that TT and ST are wedded to Hidden Minds were about the supposed nature of mental states, not about perception. It was the supposed unobservability of such states that was (unconvincingly) believed to motivate the mentalizing thesis, not specific commitments about the accomplishments of perceptual experience.
5. Conclusion To sum up, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein help us to see that, pace Gallagher, rejecting the imperceptibility thesis does not affect the raison d’être of theory theory and simulation theory. In fact, the task of showing that perception theory is preferable to the latter remains to be carried out. Gallagher has made some useful pointers in this regard, as have Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty; but I think it is safe to say that the matter has not been settled. If this chapter has brought us a step closer to settling it, it is merely by exposing as illusory one supposed reason for believing the task to be an easy one.
Notes 1 I am grateful to audiences at Wuppertal and Nijmegen Universities for helpful discussion. I thank Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Smail Rapic, Marc Slors, and László Tengelyi, for comments on earlier versions of some of the material included here. Special thanks to my commentators at the Nijmegen conference, Ken Aizawa and Julian Kiverstein, and to Komarine Romdenh-Romluc for helpful comments on the penultimate version of the paper.
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 63 2 Defenders of TT are themselves divided over whether the relevant body of information is the result of theory formation on the basis of observation, testing, and learning, as so-called ‘child-scientist theory’ maintains (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman 1995), or whether it is contained in a ‘module’ that is activated at some point in development, as so-called ‘modular theory’ has it (e.g., Leslie 1994; cf. BaronCohen 1995). 3 Neurons that fire both when we ourselves perform a particular action, say, and when we observe another perform the same action. 4 It is not obvious that PT is incompatible with subpersonal versions of ST, or for that matter subpersonal (e.g., modular) TT, although Gallagher tends to describe the view as if it were. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall assume that Gallagher is right to ascribe to TT and ST quite generally the claim that mindreading involves extra-perceptual cognitive resources. But see Overgaard and Michael (2015) for critical discussion. 5 I suppose one could also view it as an explanation of the supposed fact that we need extra-perceptual cognitive machinery to mindread, though such a reading strikes me as less natural. Note, in this connection, that in the paper that set the ‘mindreading’ debate going, Premack and Woodruff argued that the fact that mental states ‘are not directly observable’ is a reason for viewing ‘a system of inferences’ to such states as constituting a theory (Premack & Woodruff 1978: 515). 6 I know of only one example where the imperceptibility thesis is construed as a thesis about perception (as opposed to the nature of the mental): ‘Our sensory experience of other people tells us about their movements in space but does not tell us directly about their mental states’ (Meltzoff et al. 1999: 17). I suspect, though, that Meltzoff et al. may be speaking loosely here, rather than committing themselves to strong claims about perceptual experience. 7 It does not follow that Gallagher is justified in regarding TT and ST, quite generally, as being premised upon the Hidden Minds assumption, though I shall not pursue this point here (see Overgaard & Michael 2015). 8 See Reid (1785/2000), chapter 6, section 20. 9 Some of Merleau-Ponty’s formulations may seem to commit him to behaviourism— an offence of which Wittgenstein, too, has been accused. For some reflections on ways to develop a perceptual account of mindreading without embracing behaviourism, see Overgaard (2012). 10 ‘It is, I think, misleading to describe the genuine expression as a sum of the expression and something else, though it is just as misleading . . . if we say that the genuine expression is a particular behavior and nothing besides’ ( PO §§302–3). 11 I cannot go into Wittgenstein’s (or for that matter Merleau-Ponty’s) account of expression here. See Kathleen Lennon’s contribution to the present volume. 12 People, tomatoes, and oak trees are perfectly visible things. It does not follow that—in fact, it is hotly debated whether—one sees the ‘kind properties’ of such things. For example, do you, in addition to seeing the tomato’s redness and roundness, also see its being a tomato? Not everyone thinks so. For some reflections on the significance of the question of whether perceptual experience can have so-called high-level content, see Siegel (2010: 3–15), and Silins (2013). 13 See also Bax (2011), chapter 3, section 3.6. 14 ‘ “What I see can’t be the expression, because the recognition of the expression depends on my knowledge, on my general acquaintance with human behaviour.” But isn’t this merely an historical observation?’ (RPP I §1073). 15 Note that this point is obscured in Colin Smith’s translation, which has ‘recognizable’ instead of ‘readable’. I am indebted to Rasmus Thybo Jensen for calling my attention to this passage and its significance. 16 If the view sketched is indeed Merleau-Ponty’s, then he seems to understand at least some basic cases of mindreading along the lines of what Reid calls ‘acquired perception’ (see note 8 above).
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References Baron-Cohen, S. 1995. Mind-Blindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bax, C. 2011. Subjectivity After Wittgenstein. London: Continuum. Dretske, F. 1973. Perception and other minds. Noûs 7 (1): 34–44. Gallagher, S. 2008a. Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition 17: 535–543. Gallagher, S. 2008b. Inference or interaction: Social cognition without precursors. Philosophical Explorations 11: 163–174. Gallagher, S. 2012. In defense of phenomenological approaches to social cognition: Interacting with the critics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2): 187–212. Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge. Gallese, V. and Goldman, A. 1998. Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2: 493–501. Goldman, A. I. 1989. Interpretation psychologized. Mind and Language 4: 161–185. Goldman, A. I. 2012. Theory of mind. In E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 402–424. Goldman, A. I. and Sripada, C. S. 2005. Simulationist models of face-based emotion recognition. Cognition 94: 193–213. Gopnik, A. and Wellman, H. 1995. Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. In M. Davies and T. Stone (eds.), Folk psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 232–258. Gordon, R. 1986. Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language 1 (2): 158–171. Heal, J. 1995. How to think about thinking. In M. Davies and T. Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 33–52. Johnson, S. C. 2000. The recognition of mentalistic agents in infancy. Trends in Cognitive Science 4: 22–28. Lavelle, J. S. 2012. Theory-theory and the direct perception of mental states. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3: 213–230. Leslie, A. M. 1987. Children’s understanding of the mental world. In R. L. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 139–142. Leslie, A. M. 1994. ToMM, ToBy, and agency: Core architecture and domain specificity. In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 119–148. Meltzoff, A. N., Gopnik, A. and Repacholi, B. 1999. Toddlers’ understanding of intentions, desires, and emotions: explorations of the dark ages. In P. D. Zelazo, J. W. Astington, and D. R. Olson (eds.), Developing Theories of Intention. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 17–41. Overgaard, S. 2012. Other people. In D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 460–479. Overgaard, S. and Michael, J. 2015. The interactive turn in social cognition research: A critique. Philosophical Psychology 28 (2): 160–183.
Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Mindreading 65 Premack, D. and Woodruff, G. 1978. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: 515–526. Ratcliffe, M. 2007. Rethinking Common Sense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reddy, V. 2008. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reid, T. 1785/2000. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Edited by D. R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Saxe, R., Carey, S. and Kanwisher, N. 2004. Understanding other minds: Linking developmental psychology and functional neuroimaging. Annual Review of Psychology 55: 87–124. Siegel, S. 2010. The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silins, N. 2013. The significance of high-level content. Philosophical Studies 162: 13–33. Wellman, H. 1990. The Child’s Theory of Mind . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zahavi, D. 2011. Empathy and direct social perception: A phenomenological proposal. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3): 541–558. Zahavi, D. and Gallagher, S. 2008. The (in)visibility of others: A reply to Herschbach. Philosophical Explorations 11: 237–244.
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Community Without Conservatism Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the Sociality of Subjectivity Chantal Bax
1. Social Subjectivity and the Question of Conservatism According to both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, the human subject is fundamentally social in nature. Although this insight is perhaps more readily associated with Wittgenstein—famous for his remarks on practices and forms of life—Merleau-Ponty also holds that the self cannot be understood in isolation from its socio-cultural context, as can for instance be seen from the chapter on ‘Others and the Human World’ in the Phenomenology of Perception. Like Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly underscores that subjectivity is embedded as well as embodied. Indeed, in this contribution, I will use the latter’s arguments to clarify something that has remained underdeveloped in the former’s writings. For even if Wittgenstein is better known for his social view on the self, it is Merleau-Ponty who has explored some important implications of the claim that there is no subject without community. While this claim has been defended by other influential critics of Cartesianism—Heidegger and Foucault, to name just two—it has not replaced the traditional individualistic account of subjectivity without objections raised or questions asked. Commentators have pointed out that an unspecified or unqualified social view on the self may have problematic consequences, especially from an ethico-political perspective. 1 For does the claim that the subject is formed and shaped by its socio-cultural context not effectively imply that subjects are predestined to carry on inherited ways of living and thinking and thus lack the freedom to make choices for themselves? Does it not mean that the communities in which they are embedded form monolithic wholes that allow no change in composition or organization? Is the essentially social self, in other words, not inherently reactionary? In what follows, I will address questions such as these, not because I think that they inevitably follow from the claim that there is no subject without community, but because it is all the same important to understand more fully why an embedded account of subjectivity does not automatically have conservative consequences. Even though some interpreters have described Wittgenstein’s social view precisely as reactionary, 2 I will investigate for
Community Without Conservatism 67 what reasons a socially situated subject is not necessarily preprogrammed to reject what diverges from the norm. By reading Wittgenstein together with Merleau-Ponty—who explicitly discussed the possibility of socio-political change—I will explain in more detail why the embedded self is by no means precluded from being open to what is new or different. To this aim, I will first of all look into Wittgenstein’s social account of subjectivity. I will focus primarily on On Certainty: remarks in which Wittgenstein not only examines the conditions for the possibility of human knowledge, but also most consistently investigates the social formation of subjectivity of all of his writings. What is more, On Certainty makes all too clear why critics have objected to the idea that the self is formed by its socio-cultural context. Wittgenstein for instance describes children as absorbing pre-given ways of thinking without further ado, and matter-offactly observes that, were we to meet someone with a different outlook on things, ‘we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented’ (OC §155). While this could be taken to mean that an essentially social subject is indeed reactionary to the core, I will argue that this is not necessarily the conclusion that Wittgenstein himself has drawn; he simply did not work out the ethico-political implications of his view in much detail. It is for this reason that I will then turn to Merleau-Ponty, for in addition to contributing to the philosophy of subjectivity, the latter wrote extensively on matters of politics. Politics is even among the topics discussed in the Phenomenology of Perception, the book in which Merleau-Ponty famously offers an embodied account of the self. Focusing on this work, I will underscore that MerleauPonty not only explains the subject as inherently corporeal, but also identifies the social world as a permanent field of human existence. He, however, does not take this to mean that the self is imprisoned in its situation, unable to change or accept changes in social arrangements of its own accord. After repeatedly characterizing the (non-pathological) subject as free, MerleauPonty uses the final chapter of the Phenomenology to explain more fully how a situated self can be still said to have freedom, and can more specifically still be said to be an actor in socio-political change. Merleau-Ponty’s reflections can accordingly be used to answer the questions that Wittgenstein left unaddressed. After discussing the Phenomenology’s final chapter, I will apply its insights to On Certainty and conclude that neither MerleauPonty nor Wittgenstein takes the social self to be intrinsically conservative, because neither holds that its socio-cultural context is something rigid and wholly determinate. It therefore does not determine the subject’s every action and reaction in advance.
2. Wittgenstein on Community in On Certainty The insight that human life is an inherently social affair informs much of Wittgenstein’s later writings, from the Investigations’ argument against
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private language to the reflections on other minds in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. It can, however, be said to be On Certainty in which Wittgenstein most unmistakably shows that there is no subject without community. In this discussion of human epistemology, Wittgenstein explains that everything we say and do is made possible by our already taking numerous things to stand fast; assumptions we moreover make, not after deliberate investigation and experimentation, but after having undergone a process of socialization. Wittgenstein calls these basic presuppositions ‘certainties’, and they undermine the notion of a solitary and self-sufficient subject by being neither individual accomplishments nor purely individual possessions. Wittgenstein introduces the concept of certainty in response to Moore’s attempt to refute scepticism. In papers such as Proof of an External World (Moore 1993), Moore had tried to disprove the sceptic by means of statements like ‘The earth already exists for many years’ and ‘I know this is a hand’. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein tries to come to terms with the fact that he both agrees and disagrees with Moore’s endeavour. Like Moore, Wittgenstein holds that sceptical questions do not have the devastating consequences that the sceptic takes them to have, but at the same time, he feels that something is amiss with Moore’s insistence that he indisputably knows things like his having a hand. That is to say, Wittgenstein does not contest the indisputability of what Moore claims to know, but this very indisputability makes him wonder whether Moore can really be said to know these things. In the course of On Certainty, Wittgenstein points to several differences between Moore-style statements 3 and normal or actual knowledge claims, prompting him to coin a different term for the former. While he tries out different descriptions and is not always consistent in his terminology, he seems to settle for the label ‘certainty’ to characterize convictions like Moore’s. Certainties are what we unhesitatingly take for granted in all our doings and sayings; unspoken assumptions about life and the world we simply and confidently take for a fact—like there being external objects, our having a body, and every human being’s having a mind. The difference between knowledge claims and such certainties is profound, Wittgenstein maintains: they ‘belong to different categories’ (OC §308). Certainties for instance differ from knowledge claims in lacking clear procedures for justification, or in lacking justification procedures überhaupt . While a statement like ‘The earth exists’ may seem to belong to a special class of extremely well-founded knowledge claims, we would in fact have a hard time explaining how this can be proven to be true. ‘Moore chooses precisely a case,’ Wittgenstein points out, ‘in which we all seem to know the same as he, and without being able to say how’ ( OC §84). Simply stating that one knows the world exists, no matter how emphatically, does not yet amount to a proof thereof, as Wittgenstein explains in another remark: ‘when writers enumerate all the things they know, that proves nothing whatever. So the possibility of knowledge about physical objects cannot be
Community Without Conservatism 69 proved by the protestations of those who believe that they have such knowledge’ (OC §488). It is, however, unclear what further means there are for demonstrating such things. Yet even if we do not know how to justify our certainties, they are exempt from doubt and disagreement in a way that knowledge claims are not, Wittgenstein observes. Statements like ‘Cell phone radiation causes cancer’ and ‘This spearhead dates from 700 BC’ are things we debate and discuss in an attempt to come to an agreement, though we may not always succeed in reaching one. Moore-style convictions, by contrast, usually do not come up for discussion at all. We would normally not argue with someone saying ‘This is my hand’ (though we might wonder why she wants to make such a statement to begin with).4 The things Moore claims to know, Wittgenstein explains, ‘are all of such a kind that it is difficult to imagine why anyone should believe the contrary’ ( OC §93). Indeed, Moore does not merely mean to say something about his own convictions—when he declares to have knowledge of his hand, he means ‘that any reasonable person in [his] position would also know it, that it would be a piece of unreason to doubt it’ (OC §325). According to the analysis offered in On Certainty, this lack of debate and discussion is not a matter of ‘hastiness or superficiality’ ( OC §352). At some point, namely, questions and investigations have to come to an end. We would not be able to make any claim or perform any action if we would have to answer all possible questions about them beforehand: ‘We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put’ ( OC §343). Wittgenstein argues that it is precisely this hinge-like function that Moorestyle statements fulfil. Rather than amounting to knowledge claims, convictions of the kind Moore lists make knowledge possible in the first place. In line with Wittgenstein’s remarks about the lack of justification for certainties, however, they do not fulfil this function because they have been— or can be—proven to be true beyond the shadow of a doubt. Certainties allow us to look for a justification of specific knowledge claims, but they are themselves unjustified, or do at any rate not originate in investigation and validation. As Wittgenstein observes: ‘I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false’ ( OC §94). The things we take for granted in everything we do and say, in other words, have simply been handed on to us in the course of our upbringing. We need not even have learned certainties explicitly, Wittgenstein maintains. While things like ‘This is a hand’ and ‘This is your foot’ are repeatedly spelled out for children learning to speak their native tongue, most of what we take to stand fast is transmitted in an implicit manner. Children for instance ‘do not learn [. . .] that armchairs exist [. . .] —they learn to [. . .] sit in armchairs’ (OC §476) and thereby come to take the former for granted.
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Or as Wittgenstein also puts it: ‘[The child] swallows this consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns’ ( OC §143). Even though adults do not always explicitly convey their particular system of certainties, children almost automatically make the world picture of their elders their own: ‘After [the child] has seen this and this and heard that and that, he is not in a position to doubt whether’ ( OC §280) there are external objects, say, or whether every human being has a mind. This further confirms Wittgenstein’s placing knowledge and certainty into different categories. For knowledge claims, as stated, are things we debate and discuss with the aim of coming to an agreement, though we have no guarantee that we will ever reach one. In the case of certainties, however, those who have received the same upbringing do not have to come to an agreement: they already are in agreement, attuned in a more fundamental way than a deliberate quest for concord could ever achieve. Wittgenstein takes certainties to stand fast, not just for the individual, but for an entire socio-cultural group: ‘ “We are quite sure of it” does not mean just that every single person is certain of it, but that we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education’ ( OC §298). According to Wittgenstein, then, certainties are not instances of knowledge but are what makes knowledge—as well as doubt—possible to begin with. These basic presuppositions are moreover social in two important respects: a person both owes her certainties to and shares them with the other members of her community. It is this shared belief system that underlies everyday practices and that enables those who subscribe to the same set of certainties to go about their lives together, discussing a host of things except what they take to stand fast. Certainties can accordingly be said to form the lubricant for smooth (or at least relatively smooth) interaction between the members of a particular socio-cultural group. This, however, also means that they can hamper communication with persons from a different background. If people can only engage in conversation and discussion on the basis of a shared set of certainties, then the absence of a common belief system interferes with the possibility of such interaction, as Wittgenstein points out in several remarks. Giving reasons comes to an end, he explains, and ‘At the end of reasons’ (OC §612), or when ‘two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another’ ( OC §611), normal ways of arguing break down. As a result, Wittgenstein observes, ‘One might simply say “O, rubbish!” ’ (OC §495) to someone with different presuppositions; respond with swearwords and insults instead of explanations and arguments. When a basis for the latter is lacking, after all, communication with the other can no longer be uncomplicated and smooth. Observations such as these may suggest that, on a Wittgensteinian account, an essentially social self is intrinsically reactionary and always already averse to what diverges from the norm. It is therefore not surprising Wittgenstein has been interpreted as a thoroughly conservative philosopher. While these interpretations are often based primarily on the Philosophical Investigations,
Community Without Conservatism 71 Wittgenstein’s best-known work, and a commentator like Nyíri also makes use of the biographical fact that Wittgenstein hails from neo-conservative, fin de siècle Austria,5 the gist of these interpretations similarly goes that the Wittgensteinian self is unable to look beyond the conventions of its community and can only ‘deplore a movement away from the order and organic unity’ (Bloor 1983: 161) of the practices it knows. Read along reactionary lines, Wittgenstein presents us with a subject that is immersed in its culture to such an extent that it can only respond with intolerance to what is new or different. Yet while there are certainly moments in both Wittgenstein’s life and work that can be understood conservatively, both also contain material for challenging a reactionary interpretation. Wittgenstein’s interest in the books of the cultural pessimist Spengler and the anti-Semite Weininger is for instance well known, yet in the same sentence in which he mentions these authors as influences on his thought, Wittgenstein also lists the left-wing satirist Kraus and the progressive economist Sraffa.6 Wittgenstein’s own writings furthermore not only contain remarks about ‘obey[ing] the rule blindly’ (PI I §219) and having to accept pre-given ‘forms of life’ (PI II 226), but also include entries noting that linguistic practices are ‘not something [. . .] given once for all’ (PI I §23) and that ‘a language game does change with time’ ( OC §256). Prior to the passages in which Wittgenstein allows for the possibility of insulting a person with different certainties, moreover—to return completely to On Certainty— he observes that when someone is ‘contradicting my fundamental attitudes’, I will simply ‘have to put up with it’ (OC §238) rather than bully and offend her. I take this to mean that the exact implications of Wittgenstein’s social account of subjectivity are far from self-evident, and that he himself did not draw any definitive conclusions as to the reactionary or progressive nature of human beings. If Wittgenstein can be criticized from an ethico-political point of view, it is perhaps because he did not explore these implications in sufficient detail. This brings me to the writings of Merleau-Ponty, who also took the human subject to be socially situated, but who—in contrast to Wittgenstein—did not fail to investigate the political consequences of this view. In the next section, I will therefore turn to Merleau-Ponty; not only to show that he, too, offers a social account of human existence, but most importantly to examine the reasons he gives as to why an embedded view on the self does not necessarily have conservative consequences.7
3. Merleau-Ponty on Freedom in the Phenomenology Even though Merleau-Ponty is primarily known as a philosopher of human corporeality, he in fact takes the bodily and the social nature of subjectivity to go hand in hand. His interest in humans as social beings does not only come to the fore in the political essays he published from the 1940s onwards; it also informs a book like the Phenomenology of Perception, and not just its extensive footnote on historical materialism. 8
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What Merleau-Ponty for instance explains to be pathological about the Schneider case—which he extensively discusses to bring out the usual nature of our bodily being-in-the-world—is just as much the absence of true intersubjectivity from his life as his inability to perform abstract movements. Schneider has a hard time making new friends, Merleau-Ponty recounts, and while ‘He would like to be able to think about politics or religion, [. . .] he never even tries. He knows that these regions are no longer accessible to him’ (PhP 160). In the non-pathological case, by contrast, the social is part and parcel of existence: a person ‘can certainly turn away from the social world, but [. . .] cannot cease to be situated in relation to it’ ( PhP 379). Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Cartesian Ego thus not only concerns its lack of embodiment. In order to fully rethink subjectivity, he maintains, the self should be explained as both embodied and embedded: ‘we must rediscover the social world, after the natural world, not as an object or a sum of objects, but as the permanent field or dimension of existence’ ( PhP 379). One way in which Merleau-Ponty tries to capture the social dimension of human life is in terms of anonymity and generality. To be sure, MerleauPonty also uses these terms to characterize certain aspects of our bodily being-in-the-world, for instance when he states that ‘Every perception takes place within an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us as anonymous. [. . .] if I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive’ ( PhP 223). In line with what I have just emphasized, however, Merleau-Ponty’s notions of anonymity and generality do not only refer to certain shared biological facts; they have a social meaning for him as well. Merleau-Ponty accordingly mentions the same anonymous ‘One’, not just when he discusses perception, but also when he discusses socio-culturally informed (or more clearly socio-culturally informed) behaviour: ‘One uses the pipe for smoking, the spoon for eating or the bell for summoning’ (PhP 363). Like Wittgenstein, then, Merleau-Ponty maintains that what a person says and does, or how a person says and does things, should always already be seen against the background of the community of which this person is part; specific ideas about what one is supposed to do in which situations underlie her doings and sayings. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘One’ is however no more clearly non-reactionary than Wittgenstein’s idea of a shared system of certainties. Indeed, it can be said to raise questions similar to those I mentioned in my introduction: do preconceptions as to what one is supposed to do not mean that a person can only respond with intolerance to people who happen to do things differently? Do they not mean that the conventions of a particular society are impervious to change, no matter how much they might call for reform—what is more, do they not mean that a person would never even think of reform in the first place? That Merleau-Ponty does not think these questions should be answered in the affirmative can be seen from the Phenomenology’s final chapter on freedom, a large part of which is devoted to the possibility of
Community Without Conservatism 73 communist revolution. To the extent that this strikes one as an odd example for the phenomenologist to focus on, it should be noted that at the time of writing the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty was—like many French intellectuals—committed to the communist cause and accordingly thought it of vital importance to understand the possibility of a proletarian overthrow of the capitalist status quo.9 It should be possible to transform situations of exploitation from within, as Merleau-Ponty’s main problem here can be paraphrased, and workers should therefore be able to acquire classconsciousness regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves, but how exactly can we explain this potential to see through and break with existing socio-economic arrangements? In the freedom chapter, Merleau-Ponty accordingly makes unmistakably clear that he does not take the socially situated self to be inherently conservative, always already averse to new and unfamiliar things. 10 After already addressing the topic of freedom a number of times in the preceding pages of the Phenomenology—Merleau-Ponty for instance describes Schneider as being ‘ “bound” to the actual, and [to] “[lack] freedom” ’ (PhP 137). He starts the final chapter with a critical discussion of the account of freedom offered by his close collaborator Sartre. Without going into the details of their debate, 11 suffice it to say that on Merleau-Ponty’s view, the Sartrean emphasis on radical choice in effect undermines the very idea of human freedom. For in order for an act to count as free, Merleau-Ponty explains, it has to stand out against a background of unfreedom or of lesser freedom. It only makes sense to call a particular action free, after all, if we can contrast it with other actions or other aspects of human life that are not of an unrestricted nature. So if we would truly be able to choose our entire being-in-the-world at every single instant, none of our actions could actually be called free, because no background of unfreedom would remain. What is more, in a Sartrean world, there would effectively not be any use for free actions anymore. For when all situations are subject created, there are no longer subject preceding situations that in fact call ‘either for a decision that confirms them or for one that transforms them’ ( PhP 462) and that thus invite us to exercise our freedom in the first place. ‘[F]reedom must have a field’ (PhP 462), Merleau-Ponty sums up, and Sartre ends up doing away with this necessary precondition, hence with freedom itself. This means that Sartre’s intellectualist or idealist account ultimately fares no better than the idea of objective thought 12 that all human action is causally determined, Merleau-Ponty continues. Both positions fall prey to the same false dichotomy: the subject is either radically different from the world and able to impose its will on its surroundings without further ado, or is just another thing in the world and completely at the mercy of outside laws and processes. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, however, our options are not exhausted by these two extremes, and as he accordingly declares: ‘We must again take up the analysis of Sinngebung and show how it can be at once centrifugal and centripetal’ (PhP 464). We must, in other words, show how there is a
74 Chantal Bax dynamic interplay between the subject and its situation that neither makes the self into the sole situation-creating and meaning-giving authority, nor presents it as entirely determined by its situation or field. This goes for both our being situated in a physical world and our being situated in a social world, Merleau-Ponty points out, and while he starts the chapter with examples of our bodily situatedness, he mainly works out his alternative to idealism and objectivism by discussing a specific sociohistorical issue: the aforementioned possibility of communist revolution. He starts this part of the freedom chapter, too, by arguing against an overly intellectualistic account, according to which ‘the revolutionary project is [. . .] the result of a deliberate judgment’ ( PhP 471) on the part p art of the worker wo rker.. This account is supposed to be an alternative to the objectivist explanation that takes proletarian revolt to automatically follow from the dire circumstances of exploited workers. Merleau-Ponty agrees with idealism that such a deterministic explanation won’t do: in the long footnote on the proper interpretation of historical materialism earlier in the Phenomenology, he already distanced himself from a causal, reductive account of revolution, stating that ‘there is never a purely economic causality because the economy is not a closed system’ ( PhP 176). Yet while idealism is thus correct in so far as it sees that economic situations by themselves do not guarantee the emergence of a workers’ movement, Merleau-Ponty argues that it overreacts in its narrow focus on the explicit deliberations of the worker; an overreaction, moreover, that no more helps us understand the possibility of revolution than the causal account. ‘I certainly do not become a worker wo rker [. . .] the day that I commit to seeing history through the lens of class warfare’ (PhP 468–9), after all. Like the idealist account of freedom more generally, generally, the idealist account of revolution merely forms the reverse side of the objectivist view. view. As an alternative to both these positions, Merleau-Ponty then explains revolution as what he calls an existential project. According to Merleau-Ponty, that is, we should understand the rise of class consciousness from the perspective of the situated lives of laborers themselves. It is neither purely intellectual reflections nor economic relations per se but rather ‘society or the economy such as I bear them within myself and such as I live them’ ( PhP 469) that account for the possibility of communist revolution. This lived experience of economic relations is emphatically not a matter of Marxist theory and reflection. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty explains in a detailed description of the way class consciousness can arise, ‘there is no need for [a worker] to conceive of himself as a proletarian in the sense a Marxist theoretician gives the word’ (PhP 470). A factory worker may for instance simply hear about the strike at another plant that resulted in a higher wage. To be sure, this need not automatically make the recipient of the news class conscious, Merleau-Ponty hastens to add; a person may have any number of reactions upon hearing about the strike. But even so, events such as these change the laborer’s horizon or field. Similarities between his life and that of other
Community Without Conservatism 75 workers become increasingly prominent, prominent, for instance, and more and more occasions for the expression of solidarity present themselves. It is at this point that the worker can begin to see himself as part of an entire class of the oppressed and can start acting in the name of the proletariat, even if he refrains from using that specific term. The revolution, then, does not arise from a spontaneous decision, as idealism would have. On Merleau-Ponty’s view, it is rather ‘prepared for by a molecular process, it ripens in coexistence prior to bursting forth’ ( PhP 471). Like freedom, in other words, revolution must have a field. This however does not mean that workers ‘bring about the revolution unwittingly’ (PhP 471), as objectivism would have. Laborers themselves still play an active role in the revolutionary movement in the sense that it is up to them to ‘crystallize what is latent in the life of all producers’ ( PhP 471). Upon offering this existential account of communism, Merleau-Ponty formulates his findings in more general terms and returns to the problem of Sinngebung , here applied to historical events. In line with his preceding arguments, Merleau-Ponty points out that historical meaning can— contra idealism—not be a matter of free-floating subjects making spontaneous decisions. Contrary to objectivism, however, there is no such thing as meaning in events by themselves either, for ‘history is powerless to complete anything without the consciousnesses that take it up and that thereby decide its course’ ( PhP 475). According to Merleau-Ponty, put differently, historical meaning is both centrifugal and centripetal; it comes about in the exchange between the subject and its situation: ‘we give history its sense, but not without history offering us that sense’ ( PhP 475). Or as Merleau-Ponty also puts it, referring once again to the social anonymity or generality I mentioned earlier: ‘What we call the sense of events is not an idea that produces them, nor the fortuitous outcome of their assemblage. It is the concrete project of a future that is elaborated in social coexistence and in the One prior to every personal decision’ (PhP 475). Hence, while Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the One may at first sight raise questions as to the conservative nature of his socially situated subject, in the freedom chapter he uses this exact same notion to explain the possibility of communist revolution and of socio-historical change in general. In the final paragraphs of the chapter, Merleau-Ponty draws his arguments to a close and discusses in more detail why preconceptions p reconceptions as to what one ought to do in which situations do not predestine the subject to passively accept existing social arrangements. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, its socio-historical context does not predetermine the self to do anything, whether of a reactionary or of a revolutionary nature—but this is precisely what makes social transformation possible. Just as class consciousness does not causally result from exploitative economic relations, it does not automatically arise from the ‘molecular process’ of workers starting to notice similarities between their lives and that of other laborers. Far from preventing revolution, however, this allows for
76 Chantal Bax the revolutionary moment to occur ‘when the sense that was taking shape in the One and that was merely an indeterminate possibility [. . .] is taken up by an individual’ (PhP 476). What Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the One’, in other words, is a matter of relative indetermination rather than of absolute determination. It does not lay down the exact course that history should take because it does not spell out in full detail what should be done in which situations. The One should rather be understood in terms of general suggestions or unspecified directions that still have to be implemented, and that can be implemented in a number of different ways. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘molecular process’, for instance, could lead to both violent upheaval and peaceful resistance. What one is supposed to do, therefore, is not always already given in advance. The socio-historical situation in which the subject finds itself is not something wholly determining because it is not something wholly determined: ‘The world is always already constituted, but also never completely constituted’ (PhP 480). Our situations may accordingly solicit us, or motivate us, as Merleau-Ponty carefully puts it, but they do not force or dictate us. In line with the idea that history is powerless in and of itself, it is always still up to subjects themselves to take up the solicitations of their situation and to make actual sense of what is only ambiguously present in history as such. This means that a person can also ignore the solicitations of the One, or respond to them in as of yet unheard of ways. An individual can steer history ‘well beyond what seemed to be its sense’ (PhP 476), Merleau-Ponty explains, because one’s one’s past and milieu are only ‘moments of my total being whose sense I could make explicit in different directions’ ( PhP 482). Hence, as Merleau-Ponty himself already pointed out in the footnote on historical materialism, ‘what we said [. . .] about the existential conception of “expression” and “signification” must again be applied here’ ( PhP 176). Similar to the accounts of meaning and perception offered in the earlier chapters of the Phenomenology, the account of history offered in the freedom chapter presents it as a two-way affair, as an interchange between the subject and its situation. This interchange is made both possible and necessary by the fact that the situation in which the subject finds itself, is not always already clearly determined and still waits to be made concrete. ‘An existential theory of history is’ therefore ‘ambiguous,’ the footnote continues, ‘but it cannot be reproached for this ambiguity, for the ambiguity is in the things’ (PhP 176). It is because of this equivocality, equivocality, moreover, moreover, that the subject is not predestined to carry on existing situations or conventions until the end of time. The ambiguity implies that the future or o r the future form of a particular convention is never given. Husserl was right to maintain that ‘there is a “field of freedom” and a “conditioned freedom”,’ Merleau-Ponty concludes, ‘not because freedom is absolute within the limits of this field and nothing outside of it (for just like the perceptual field, this one too has no linear limits), but because I have immediate possibilities and more distant possibilities’
Community Without Conservatism 77 (PhP 481), or because my non-linear field, precisely because of its being non-linear, always offers me a number of more or less articulated options to take up. This even prompts Merleau-Ponty to state, after repeatedly emphasizing that we can never completely leave our situation behind, that ‘we carry with us—from the mere fact that we are in and toward the world [. . .]—all that is necessary for transcending ourselves’ ( PhP 483).
4. Community Without Conservatism As I explained in my introduction, the claim that there is no subject without community raises questions as to the conservative nature of human existence. Insofar as On Certaint y suggests that the social self is indeed reactionary to the core, the Phenomenology makes clear that the situated subject is not inherently conservative, unable to change or accept changes in social arrangements of its own accord. For on Merleau-Ponty’s account, situations lack a clear delineation and are therefore not the kind of things one can be imprisoned in or determined by. It is rather up to subjects themselves to give direction to the multi-interpretable conventions that happen to be their own. This by no means guarantees that social arrangements are never given a static and rigid interpretation; the history of communism itself testifies to this fact. According to Merleau-Ponty, however—who unsurprisingly came to criticize the Soviet interpretation of Marxism 13—making one’s social situation into a static and rigid thing is not the only possible or even necessary response to its solicitations, and is moreover a response that can always be undone. Returning to Wittgenstein, something similar can be said about his social account of subjectivity. To be sure, one would not automatically associate On Certainty with indeterminacy and ambiguity, but reading these remarks next to the Phenomenology allows us bring out things that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. For while Wittgenstein explains that a particular certainty only has its foundational function because it is part of a ‘whole system’ (OC §141) of presuppositions, the examples he gives of certainties are numerous and diverse: he for instance mentions mathematical, historical as well as autobiographical convictions. This means that the certainties that underlie a person’s doings and sayings do not necessarily make for a neatly ordered whole without overlaps, gaps, or inconsistencies. A system need not be entirely seamless to function, and the idea of a well-defined set of presuppositions could be said to be at odds with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the non- or pre-intellectual nature of certainties. As he himself observes: ‘Our “empirical propositions” do not form a homogeneous mass’ ( OC §213). While the ‘our’ here is equivocal, it can be said to refer as much to every individual’s as to a specific community’s set of certainties. It is after all in the course of one’s upbringing that one comes to take these things to stand fast, and even within a given society, not everyone’s initiation into the practices of the community will be entirely the same. Those who never had a physics
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class, to give one very simple example, will probably not take the exact same things for granted as those who did receive such education. 14 Like a particular person’s set of certainties, therefore, a community’s system of basic presuppositions need not make for a carefully ordered unity without internal difference. Even if some of Wittgenstein’s remarks suggest that certainties make for a strict set of norms that allow no deviation, this means that there is not necessarily a rigid and uniform whole to conform to in the first place. As a result—and regardless of the fact that Wittgenstein focuses on examples in which the contrast between certainties is big and straightforward—it is not always already clear which new or unconventional doings and sayings can still be said to be part of the community’s practices, and which ones cannot. If the community’s certainties do not form a homogeneous mass, it should be said to be a practical question which perspectives can be included or excluded, rather than something that can be stated beforehand. As is the case with Merleau-Ponty’s One, this does not guarantee that communal practices will never be given a reactionary interpretation. It, however, does mean that a conservative response to the new or different is only one among a number of possible reactions, as already became clear from the final quote I gave in the second section. A person could also decide to just put up with the difference, for instance, or perhaps be ‘torn away from the sureness of the game’ (OC §617) and realize that other perspectives on life and the world are possible too. For as became clear from other remarks I quoted at the end of the second section, Wittgenstein does not maintain that practices are given once and for all. Contrary to his seeming conservatism, he points out that certainties can change and become a topic for discussion rather than unspoken agreement, or as he metaphorically observes: ‘It might be imagined that some propositions [. . .] were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were [. . .] fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid’ (OC §96).15 According to Wittgenstein, in other words, it not a given that what we take for granted now will also shape our practices in the future. Certainties can lose their indisputability, and heterogeneity within a community’s world picture provides an explanation for how such breaks or shifts arise. Both in the case of Wittgenstein and in the case of Merleau-Ponty, then, the claim that there is no subjectivity without community does not imply that the self is intrinsically reactionary. Neither maintains that the subject is predetermined to carry on inherited conventions until the end of time, because both hold that it is a matter of our actual reactions and responses how static or dynamic our socio-cultural situation will be. Even if this does not make humans into inherently progressive beings, it does not condemn us to conservatism either. Indeed, it does not condemn us to a pre-given view on all social change at all.
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Notes 1 See, e.g., Benhabib (1992), who argues that when one takes the subject to be completely constituted by its community—rather than only being situated in it— one does away with a locus for crucial ethico-political notions such as agency and autonomy. 2 See, e.g., Nyiri (1982), Bloor (1983). Critics have also argued that MerleauPonty is insufficiently progressive (see e.g. Butler (1989), Grimshaw (1999)), but these criticisms mainly concern his notion of the body and amount to the claim that the latter is, rather than being overly social, by no means social enough. 3 Wittgenstein also points out that the things Moore claims to know normally go unexpressed, and function as certainties precisely by being of a non-propositional nature; see e.g. OC 87, 159, 204, 402, 466, 467. 4 In some cases a statement like ‘This is my hand’ does not necessarily go without saying (e.g., when it concerns amputation or a prosthetic device). According to Wittgenstein, however, in such cases ‘This is my hand’ no longer (or not yet) functions as a certainty. 5 See Nyíri (1982). 6 See Monk (1990: 316–17). 7 My understanding of Merleau-Ponty thus differs from that of the critics I mentioned in note 2, who argue that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily subjectivity is reactionary for overlooking the socio-cultural context of human life; I neither take Merleau-Ponty to ignore the social nature of subjectivity nor to be a conservative philosopher. See Oksala (2006) for a more detailed response to Butler and Grimshaw. 8 See PhP 174–8. For more elaborate discussions of the relation between MerleauPonty’s philosophy and his politics, arguing that the latter in fact forms the basis for the former, see Whiteside (1988) and Coole (2007). 9 Wittgenstein also seems to have had an interest in Marxism; he for instance had a number of communist friends (including the aforementioned Sraffa) and made plans to visit the Soviet Union (see Monk 1990: 248, 343). I will not pursue this particular similarity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty any further, also because I am not interested in Merleau-Ponty’s view on communism per se but only as a case study for his general view on socio-historical change. 10 If the contemporary reader precisely associates communism with conservatism and repression, it should be noted that Marxism—as will also become clear below—never was a matter of force or totalitarianism for Merleau-Ponty but precisely a way to (eventually) overcome struggle and conflict. He acknowledged the violence committed by the Stalinist regime at an early stage, and while this did not bring him to reject Marxism immediately (i.e., in Humanism and Terror), he began to publish criticisms of a dogmatic, Soviet-style interpretation of communism (e.g. Adventures of the Dialectic) in the 1950s; see Flynn (2007). 11 See Compton (1982) for a more thorough discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s debate with Sartre. 12 It should be noted that idealism can also be understood as a particular manifestation of objective thought rather than as its opposite, but in the freedom chapter Merleau-Ponty describes them as being counterparts and does not use ‘objective thought’ as a label under which idealism can (together with empiricism) be said to fall. 13 See note 10. 14 Other examples can be given along the lines of Young, who points out that boys and girls are not taught the same things about themselves and their place in the world (see Young 1980; while she bases herself on Merleau-Ponty, her point can
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also be made in Wittgensteinian terms, for certainties precisely show themselves in what people do and say, or in how they do and say things). And as Cavell explains, when children do not receive the same level or kind of affection, that will also have an impact on what they come to take for granted, in this case about inter-human relations (see Cavell 1979: 177). 15 Compare this to Nyiri’s interpretation, according to whom Wittgenstein does allow for the possibility of change, but only when it emerges organically (Nyíri 1982: 61). That Wittgenstein employs a natural metaphor here however does not mean that he rules out the possibility of change as a result of our own actions and reactions. According to the river metaphor, after all, it is precisely because of movements in the water, or changes at the level of the knowledge claims we make, that the riverbed of certainties might shift.
References Benhabib, S. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloor, D. 1983. Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. London: Macmillan Press. Butler, J. 1989. Sexual ideology and phenomenological description. In J. Allen and I. M. Young (eds.), The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philoso phy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 85–100. Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Compton, J. J. 1982. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and human freedom. The Journal of Philosophy 79 (10): 577–588. Coole, D. 2007. Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Flynn, B. 2007. The development of the political philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Continental Philosophy Review 40: 125–138. Grimshaw, J. 1999. Working out with Merleau-Ponty. In J. Arthurs and J. Grimshaw (eds.), Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression. London: Cassell, pp. 91–116. Monk, R. 1990. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape. Moore, G. E. 1993. Selected Writings. Edited by T. Baldwin. London: Routledge, pp. 147–170. Nyíri, J. C. 1982. Wittgenstein’s later work in relation to conservatism. In B. McGuinness (ed.), Wittgenstein and His Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 44–68. Oksala, J. 2006. Female freedom: Can the lived body be emancipated? In D. Olkowski and G. Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 209–228. Whiteside, K. 1988. Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young, I. M. 1980. Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies 3 (1): 137–156.
5
The World and I1 Komarine Romdenh-Romluc
Solipsism is the view that the I—my self—is, in some sense, alone. There are different forms of solipsism, which vary along two dimensions. First, solipsistic views can differ in how alone they take the I to be: one might claim that the I is the only self in a world of objects or non-selves. Or one could take the I to be all that there is. Second, there are different views one might take up concerning the nature of these claims. They can be understood as metaphysical claims about what exists; epistemological claims about what can be known; or as phenomenological claims about the character of experience. (These options are not mutually exclusive.) The standard view is that solipsism in all its varieties is at best, a deeply unattractive position, and at worst, absurd. It is surely undeniable that I share the world with other people. Moreover, this fact features in my experience and is knowable by me. Nevertheless, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein—two of the twentieth century’s most profound and interesting thinkers—hold that solipsism expresses something important about the human condition. My aim in this paper is to articulate what they take solipsism to express. Much has been written about Wittgenstein’s views on solipsism (see, e.g., Anscombe 1959; Hacker 1986; Diamond 1991; Pears 1996). Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about solipsism and our relations with others have also received a fair amount of attention in the literature (see, e.g., Madison 1981; Carman 2008; Romdenh-Romluc 2011; Morris 2012). Thus, one might wonder what more there is to say on the topic. I hope to show here that revisiting these ideas is a fruitful enterprise. I will argue that the form of solipsism that most concerns Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein is phenomenological, and their theories can be used to illuminate each other. Reading them together yields a single account of human experience that reveals how its structure makes phenomenological solipsism an ever-present possibility for us.
1. Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Consciousness, and the Puzzle of Solipsism Phenomenological solipsism holds that experience is solipsistic: I experience myself as alone in some significant sense—my experience presents me as
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being the only self, or as the only one of a special kind of self. One may be puzzled by my claim that Merleau-Ponty endorses anything like this position, since he seeks to accurately describe the phenomenology of our lives, and it seems that each of us ordinarily experiences herself as just one of many similar selves who share a common world. Moreover, phenomenological solipsism seems to be ruled out by Merleau-Ponty’s conception of consciousness as embodied. Solipsistic experience is instead associated with the view of the mind and body as distinct. On this conception, I am directly aware of my own mind through introspection, but I can never directly experience another. All I ever perceive are other bodies, but these are distinct from other minds. My experience thus presents me as being the only self in the world.2 In contrast, Merleau-Ponty conceives of mind and body as intertwined aspects of a single embodied consciousness. Since I perceive many human bodies, my perceptual experience thus presents me as one of many embodied selves who inhabit the world. However, there is a difference between perceiving what is in fact another self, and perceiving it as a self. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of consciousness says nothing about the latter. If I never perceive another as a self, then my experience has solipsistic tendencies, even if I perceive what are in fact other selves, and I know this to be the case. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty suggests that there is a solipsistic element to experience, which a thoroughgoing phenomenology must capture. He writes, ‘we see a lived solipsism that cannot be transcended’ (PhP 374). He continues, ‘[c]onsciousnesses present the absurdity of a solipsism-shared-by-many, and such is the situation that must be understood’ (PhP 376). It is clear that Merleau-Ponty takes the solipsism in experience to be connected with having a perspective on the world— something that he takes to be essential to being a subject. In his discussion of intersubjectivity, he first searches for ways in which my experience presents me as a subject, and presents others as similar to me. After laying out some initial suggestions, he then objects to his analysis. He writes, But is it really the other that we reach in this way? We, in effect, level out the I and the You in an experience-shared-by-many, we introduce the impersonal into the center of subjectivity, and we erase the individuality of perspectives—but, in this general conflation, have we not caused the alter Ego to disappear along with the Ego? (PhP 372, my italics) The worry that Merleau-Ponty raises here is that his analysis does not accommodate the fact that each self has a particular perspective on the world, and thus it subsequently fails to be an account of the relations between selves at all. It is after noting that each self necessarily has a perspective on the world that he comes to the conclusion that living experience contains a solipsism. Merleau-Ponty never explains in detail what he takes the connection between having a perspective and solipsism to be.
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2. Wittgenstein and Solipsism Wittgenstein offers an account of human experience as solipsistic, which explains the connection Merleau-Ponty identifies between solipsistic experience and perspective. Initially, one may be surprised by the claim that Wittgenstein endorses phenomenological solipsism. In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein tells us that ‘the world is my world’ (TLP §5.62), ‘I am my world’ (TLP §5.63), and that ‘what solipsism means is quite correct’ (TLP §5.62). These statements amount to an endorsement of the claim that I am my world, which looks rather like the view that the I is all there is (Bell 1996). Wittgenstein thus appears to be concerned primarily with a metaphysical sort of solipsism. Whilst metaphysics and phenomenology are not mutually exclusive, it is not obvious that Wittgensteinian solipsism is, or is intended to be, an account of lived experience. Why think, then, that Wittgensteinian solipsism has any connection with phenomenology? A reading given by Bell (1996) provides the resources to answer this question. He takes Wittgenstein to tacitly accept what he calls the ‘Franklin Requirement’. This is a condition alluded to by Christine Ladd-Franklin in a letter she sent to Bertrand Russell. It states that for solipsism to be acceptable, it must be fact-preserving (Bell 1996: 159). Bell connects this condition with the Wittgensteinian thesis that the language we use to describe the world is, to some degree, conventional—i.e., the nature of the world does not entirely dictate how we must describe it. I can, e.g., describe my dog as ‘my dog’, or as ‘instantiated doghood’, or as ‘the furry Overlord’. The nature of the world does not determine which of these descriptions I should use. It is, of course, more usual to employ the phrase ‘my dog’, but this is merely a matter of convention. It follows that there can be different ways of describing exactly the same set of facts. We can thus distinguish between descriptions of the world that posit a different set of facts to those we usually take to obtain, and descriptions that acknowledge exactly the same set of facts, but describe them differently. Bell calls the latter ‘alternative notations’ (Bell 1996: 163). The Franklin Requirement holds that for some form of solipsism to be an acceptable philosophical position, it must be an alternative notation; it must not posit a different set of facts to the ones we usually take to obtain. It is important to note that alternative notations are not competing hypotheses that explain the same set of data. For example, there are two main theories concerning the extinction of the dinosaurs. One theory states that this happened quickly as a result of a cataclysmic event, such as an asteroid colliding with the earth. The second theory states that the dinosaurs became extinct gradually, over a period of millions of years. Both theories are consistent with the available evidence. But they are not alternative notations because they posit different sets of facts. Contrast this example with the following: ‘Imagine a language in which, instead, of saying “I found nobody
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in the room”, one said, “I found Mr. Nobody in the room” ’ (BB 69). These two sentences are alternative notations. They describe exactly the same fact—that the room is empty of people. In particular, the surface grammar of the latter sentence should not lead us to think that it posits the existence of an extra person! One might think that the difference between competing hypotheses and alternative notations is clear. However, a little more must be said on how they are to be distinguished. Contrast the claim that it was mere chance that led me to choose my dog (rather than any other) with the claim that Fate brought us together. Are these competing hypotheses or alternative notations? One might opt for the former on the grounds that the latter posits the existence of a mysterious force—Fate—which is missing from the former explanation. Yet one might also argue that they are alternative notations on the grounds that the positing of Fate makes no practical difference to the situation. It does not change what can be observed, nor does it make any difference to how one should behave. The only change that might flow from a belief in Fate is a difference in one’s attitude towards events. Perhaps one will be more inclined to accept what comes one’s way with grace, rather than rail against one’s misfortunes. But even this is by no means certain. The example raises the question of what it is for a description to be factpreserving in the way required for it to be an alternative notation. Bell takes Wittgenstein to hold that it must make no difference to our ordinary experience or practices. According to this criterion, the claim that it was mere chance I chose Billy from the dog pound, and the alternative view that Fate brought us together are alternative notations—my ordinary experience and practices are left untouched, no matter which view I adopt. Thus, on this reading, the Franklin Requirement holds that for some form of solipsism to be acceptable, it must be an alternative notation that preserves the facts, where this means that it must be a description that coheres with our lived experience. One might then wonder what might be gained from an alternative notation, given that—by definition—it makes no difference to everyday experience or practice. Wittgenstein’s answer is that it might reveal something of philosophical significance. His view is that the essence of our grammar is the essence of our world, i.e., the world as we find or live it—‘ Essence is expressed by grammar’ (PI I §371). The essence of our grammar is what alternative notations have in common: A proposition possesses essential and accidental features. Accidental features are those that result from the particular way in which the propositional sign is produced. Essential features are those without which the expression could not express its sense. (TLP §3.34) The method of varying notations allows us to discover what is essential to our grammar, thus revealing the essence of our world. It is interesting to note
The World and I 85 here that Wittgenstein is proposing something akin to the eidetic reduction. The eidetic reduction is part of Husserl’s phenomenological method. Its aim is to reveal the essential structures of consciousness. One does this by imaginatively varying the features of the phenomena with which one is presented. This allows one to distinguish between those features that are essential to phenomena of the type in question, and those that are merely accidental. The upshot is that the Franklin Requirement entails that an acceptable solipsism must be fact-preserving, which means that it must be a description of things that coheres with our everyday experience and practices. If an alternative, solipsistic notation is available, it will help reveal the essential structures of human experience. Wittgenstein’s commitment to the Franklin Requirement, and his understanding of what this entails, means that we can take his solipsism to be an account of lived experience; we can understand Wittgenstein as doing phenomenology. There is a further reason why one might be suspicious of my claim that Wittgenstein endorsed phenomenological solipsism. The early Wittgenstein certainly appears to endorse solipsism of some sort, as the remarks cited above illustrate, but there is broad agreement amongst philosophers that solipsism is absurd, or at the very least, highly implausible. Many commentators thus deny that Wittgenstein’s statements on this subject should be taken at face-value.3 Moreover, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein advances a number of considerations, collectively known as ‘the private language argument’, which are almost universally read as a rejection of solipsism. Thus it is generally agreed that even if Wittgenstein was once foolishly tempted into solipsism (and it is not certain that he was), his mature view was that solipsism is untenable and should be rejected. However, there is an alternative reading of Wittgenstein available, according to which the early Wittgenstein did endorse solipsism, and the private language argument is a development of the very same position (Bell 1996). On this reading, Wittgenstein understands consciousness, or the subject, in line with a well-established philosophical tradition that takes a self to be essentially bound up with having a perspective or point of view on the world. The idea has its roots in perceptual experience. Perception is egocentric. One perceives the world as located in space around one. I see my dog stirring in his bed a short distance to my right; I see a collection of house plants a metre in front of me; my tactile experience presents the computer keyboard under my hands, just in front of my body; I perceive the sofa underneath me; and so on. It is part of this experience that I am aware of myself as located relative to the things I perceive. I am aware of myself as located at the centre of egocentric space—at the point from which things are seen. Thus to be the subject of perceptual experience is to have a point of view on the perceived world. Wittgenstein then takes this notion of the subject to lead to the conclusion that the self is, as it is often put, ‘systematically elusive’—one cannot come across the self (qua self) in either inner or outer space. A classic presentation of the Elusiveness Thesis is found in this passage from Hume.
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Some version of this thesis has been endorsed by various philosophers, including Kant (1929), Sartre (1989), and Ryle (1949). Various arguments are offered in support of the Elusiveness Thesis. But the one on which Wittgenstein relies turns on the thought that a perspective is not an item that one can come across in experience. One perceives from a perspective, but this perspective cannot itself be perceived. Anything one may come across in the world is something on which one has a perspective; it is not identical with that perspective. Wittgenstein writes, Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You say that this is exactly the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by the eye. (TLP §§5.633–5.6331) We find the same thought expressed elsewhere too, Visual space has essentially no owner . . . The essential thing is that the representation of visual space is the representation of an object and contains no suggestion of a subject. (PR 100) Wittgenstein assumes these points are true, in particular, of one’s body. One can perceive one’s own body, but this means that one has a perspective on it. One does not experience it as the perspective from which things are perceived, If I wrote a book called ‘The world as I found it’, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. If I wrote a book called The world as I Found It. (TLP §5.631) It follows that since the self is the point of view on the world, the self cannot be experienced as part of the world. In other words, the perspective on the world that is the I has no extension—it is the geometric point from which things are seen. ‘The I . . . shrinks to an extensionless point’ ( TLP §5.64).
The World and I 87 The idea of the self as a geometric point of view grounds Wittgenstein’s claim that I am the world. Bell points out that this claim can be read in two ways. It is natural to read it as an identification of the world with the self, so that the world ‘disappears’, leaving only the I. This is, of course, the usual way to understand the strongest form of metaphysical solipsism: as the view that the self is all there is. But Wittgenstein’s claim can also be read in the other ‘direction’ so that the I disappears, leaving only the world. A point of view is essentially a point of view on something . There can be no perspective without the existence of that upon which it is a point of view. In this sense, the perspective can be identified with that on which it is a perspective: the world. The latter is the reading intended by Wittgenstein—‘The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it’ (TLP §5.64). Read in this way, the identification of the I with the world leaves the world exactly as it is, and so, ‘solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism’ ( TLP §5.64). One might suppose that Wittgenstein’s claim that only the world is left means that my psychological life—the experiences, thoughts, desires, wishes, emotions, and so on that I undergo every day—has been erased from the picture. Since my psychological life is an important feature of my ordinary experience, a description of things that left no place for it would violate the Franklin Requirement. However, Bell argues that Wittgenstein’s solipsism does not deny the existence of my psychological life. Instead, it offers a different description of it to the one offered by the traditional picture. Since Descartes, it is usual to think of subjectivity as an inner realm, distinct from the external world, and accessible only to the subject. My psychological states populate my inner realm. Just as external space contains dogs, cars, camels, trees, and all the other entities one encounters as one makes one’s way about the world, so too inner space contains one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, and so on. Whilst this picture is compelling, many writers—including Wittgenstein—have identified numerous difficulties with it. Wittgenstein’s solipsism implies a rejection of this picture. The shrinking of the self to an extensionless point is the disappearance of inner space. The subject as a point of view on the world has no inner volume. But this does not mean that one’s ‘inner’ states vanish. Instead, one should understand one’s psychological life as happening in the world. Bell (1996) connects this point with Wittgenstein’s no-ownership view of the self, which denies that my experiences, thoughts, and other psychological phenomena are owned.4 Once the self is conceived as a point of view on the world, this denial makes sense. (Recall Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘visual space has essentially no owner’ ( PR 100).) Experiences are undergone from a perspective. For example, you and I both experience my love for my dog. But we each have a different perspective on it. You see it in my gestures when I engage with him; the loving look on my face when I talk about him; the concern in my voice as I speak to the vet when he is ill. I, on the other hand, am the one who loves him, and I experience my love from
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this point of view. It manifests in such things as the lovable, familiar look of my dog; the sense of urgency that pervades the world when he is ill and needs medical attention. But a perspective is not the sort of thing that can own experience. Wittgenstein writes, One of the misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I’, particularly when it is used in representing immediate experience . . . It would be instructive to replace this way of speaking with another in which immediate experience would be representing without using the personal pronoun, for then we’d be able to see that the previous representation wasn’t essential to the facts. (PR 88) These ideas point to the following picture of how one’s psychological life manifests to one. It is experienced as all out in the world, and on a par with other worldly events: Amongst other things, the world as I find it contains thoughts, feelings of misery and happiness, sensations, perceptions, desires, and the like. Some of these will indeed be contingently related to a particular body [found at the Centre]—but then again, some of them will be contingently related to ambient temperature, say, or the presence of food, or the fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday. In addition to thoughts, feelings, sensations and the like, which are events in the world, there will also be such things as football matches, hurricanes, and eclipses of the sun. And these too are events in the world. For me, as the Centre, none of these occurrences involves any identification of an owner, or bearer, or subject who has them. From this new perspective [that of Wittgenstein’s alternative solipsistic notation] a hurricane is just as little, or as much, “mine” as is a headache. (Bell 1996: 65) Finally, one may wonder how this position has any call to be named ‘solipsism’ since the I has disappeared, leaving only the world. The answer to this is that the world that is left behind when the I disappears is ‘the reality co-ordinated with’ the point of view that is me ( TLP §5.64). In other words, it is an essentially perspectival world. In this sense, it is my world. I am the zero point around which it revolves. Bell tells us that the world is one ‘pervaded’ by my subjectivity (Bell 1996: 168). This is what Wittgenstein means when he says, ‘The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that “the world is my world” ’ (TLP §5.641). I claimed earlier that Wittgenstein’s endorsement of the Franklin Requirement means that he intends his solipsism to be a phenomenological account of experience, so to defend it, we must show that it does indeed capture some aspect of human life. Bell (1996) suggests that it is an alternative
The World and I 89 notation describing the experience of any human subject, because adopting this description leaves our ordinary experience and practices untouched. But this does not seem credible. However, phenomenology—at least since Merleau-Ponty—does not discriminate against any type of experiences. The so-called pathological, the extraordinary, the rare, are all grist to the phenomenologist’s mill in trying to understand the essential structure of human subjectivity. It follows that a phenomenological defence of Wittgenstein’s solipsism need not show that it captures the experience of any human subject. It will be sufficient to show that it correctly describes some form of human experience. I will show that Wittgenstein’s solipsism accurately captures certain experiences that are characteristic of schizophrenia. 5 On Wittgenstein’s picture, the I cannot be identified with the bodily self. I am a perspective on the world, whilst the body is just another thing in the world on which I have a perspective. This claim implies alienation from my own body—it is not experienced as me. It implies further that my body is experienced as lacking in subjectivity. In other words, it is presented to me as a mere object, such that there is no essential difference between it and inanimate things like rocks and chairs. Wittgenstein makes this alienation vivid in a remark quoted above. If I wrote a book called ‘The world as I found it’, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. (TLP §5.631) In this remark, Wittgenstein distinguishes the subject from the body and conjures up an image of the latter as a puppet whose strings are pulled by one’s will. Alienation from the body is typical of certain characteristic forms of schizophrenic experience. Stanghellini states that ‘in schizophrenic states, the body . . . is experienced as a sort of object that is detached from the prime initiator of the movement, their actions detached from the energy that should spontaneously feed it’ (Stanghellini 2004: 157). Schizophrenic alienation from one’s own body, which is experienced as a mere object, is expressed in the following first-person reports, ‘[There’s] no inside of the body, but only a frame . . . food is falling into a vacuum . . . behind the chest is nothing, only a big hole’ (Angyal 1936: 1042). ‘I’m blessed with a bladder-emptyer that I can turn on and off, and an anal expeller’ (Stanghellini 2004: 155). A second component to Wittgenstein’s solipsism is the notion of my own psychological goings-on as events I encounter in the world, which are just as much or as little ‘mine’ as hurricanes, and other impersonal worldly events. My psychological life is not experienced as owned by me. This claim again implies alienation—this time separation from one’s own psychological life.
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Once more, we find that this is characteristic of schizophrenic experience, as the following remarks attest. ‘My first personal life has been lost and replaced by a third person perspective’ (Parnas 2000: 124). ‘It is not me the one who feels’, and ‘It is not me who feels—It feels’ (Stanghellini 2004: 157). ‘Feelings are not felt by me, things are not seen by me, only by my eyes’ (Spitzer 1990: 393–4). ‘[I doubt] that it is me thinking, myself’ (Rosser 1979: 182). The third component is the identification of the self with a bare point of view on the surrounding space—a perspective on the world that is not part of it—and the correlative claim that since the world is experienced from my own perspective, it is my world. The alienation from one’s own body in schizophrenia is an experienced separation from one’s bodily insertion in the world. Unsurprisingly, this often goes hand in hand with experience of oneself as a mere point of view on the world—a distant spectator who does not interact with the spectacle. Moreover, just as Wittgenstein connects the notion of the self as point of view with the solipsistic conception of the world as my world, so too, we find that the schizophrenic experience of oneself as a mere perspective is often accompanied by the sense that the world is mine. Sass writes, ‘perhaps the most emblematic delusion of this enigmatic illness [schizophrenia] is of being a sort of God-machine, a kind of all-seeing, all-constituting camera eye’ (1999: 320). The experience is expressed in statements such as the following. ‘I feel like an emperor inside a pyramid’ (Stanghellini 2004: 155). ‘My thoughts can influence things’, ‘This event happens because I think it’, ‘To keep the world going, I must not stop thinking’ (Spitz 1990: 393–4). ‘I could create the events of my universe by just thinking them, believing them to be true . . . What really terrified me was when I realized that I could conceive of wrenching the world from its axis’ (Sass 1999: 330). In summary, Wittgenstein’s solipsism takes as its starting point the idea that the self is a point of view. Once this notion is in place, his solipsistic picture flows from it. Any item one experiences is something on which one has a perspective; it is not identical with that perspective. The self is thus divorced from the body and slips out of the world. One’s psychological life has to be part of the world on which one has a perspective—there is no ‘where’ else to situate it. To experience the world from a perspective is to experience oneself as the origin of egocentric space, with the world laid out around one. In other words, it is to experience oneself as the zero point, around which the world revolves. The I is thus a Godlike view on its own world. Wittgenstein’s solipsistic notation is confirmed as an accurate description of lived experience by the characteristic forms of schizophrenic experience identified above, which are often found together in the experience of a single subject (Sass 1999; Stanghellini 2004). However, Wittgenstein’s solipsism cannot be a complete phenomenological account because the schizophrenic experiences that confirm it stand in stark contrast
The World and I 91 to non-schizophrenic experience, which presents the subject as just one of many similar selves who share a common world. Something is missing from Wittgenstein’s account. To see what this is, we must return to MerleauPonty’s philosophy.
3. Merleau-Ponty and the Body Merleau-Ponty, like Wittgenstein, identifies the subject with a point of view on the world. But unlike Wittgenstein, he pays close attention to the experience of one’s own body, and it is this which—for most of us—mitigates the solipsism that flows from being a perspective on the world. There are two features of bodily experience that are particularly relevant in the present context: the awareness of one’s perspective as embodied, and the transfer of the body schema to other people. I will consider both of these in turn. On Wittgenstein’s solipsistic picture, one’s body is experienced as just one of the items in the world on which one has a perspective. His description implies alienation from one’s own body, which is experienced as apart from, rather than identical with, oneself. The schizophrenic experiences that fit this description highlight the fact that such alienation is absent from at least some forms of non-schizophrenic awareness. Merleau-Ponty accounts for this by describing one’s awareness of one’s perspective not as an extensionless point of view, but as embodied. One might initially take MerleauPonty’s claim to be the simple observation that one experiences one’s own body as located in the same place as the point from which one’s perspective originates. However, his claim runs deeper than this. To see the world from a perspective is to experience items in the world as located relative to where one appears to be. If one merely experienced one’s body as being in the same place as one’s point of view, one would still experience it as located relative to one’s apparent location. It would still be an object on which one had a perspective—rather than being experienced as the embodiment of one’s point of view. Merleau-Ponty holds instead that one experiences one’s body as being the origin of egocentric space. It is presented as the zero point that establishes its co-ordinates; it is not presented relative to those co-ordinates. To put matters more simply, my body is not presented as just another item that is located relative to me; I perceive worldly items as located relative to my body. The thesis that I experience my body as being the origin or zero point of egocentric space means that it must feature in my perceptual field without being something on which I simply have a perspective. Initially, this claim may strike one as implausible. I experience it using the same senses that I use to experience other worldly items—I can see, touch, hear, etc., my own body. My senses give me an awareness of worldly things as located around me in space—they provide me with a perspective on those things. Thus it seems my sensory awareness of my body must provide me with a perspective
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on it. However, whilst Merleau-Ponty does not deny that I can experience my body using my senses, he rejects this simple account of the situation. He begins by considering what it is like for one’s two hands to touch each other, and makes the following observations: [T]he two hands are never simultaneously both touched and touching. So when I press my two hands together, it is not a question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed, but rather of an ambiguous organization where the two hands can alternate between the functions of ‘touching’ and ‘touched’. In speaking of ‘double sensations’, psychologists mean that, in the passage from one function to the other, I can recognize the touched hand as the same hand that is about to be touching. (PhP 95) In this passage, Merleau-Ponty claims that when my two hands touch one another, one is the object of tactile experience (the touched), whilst the other is the subject (the touching). Moreover, there is a phenomenological difference between the two roles. I am aware of the touched hand in the same sort of way that I am aware of other worldly objects when I touch them. But my awareness of the touching hand is different. I am aware of the touching hand as the subject of experience. I am aware of it, in other words, as part of me. This means that in my experience, there can be no ‘distance’ between me and the touching hand. There is always ‘distance’ between me and an object on which I have a perspective, since experiencing oneself as having a perspective on something is to experience it as located relative to me, and to experience it as located relative to myself is to experience myself as separate from it. It follows that when I experience my hand touching, my awareness cannot present it as something on which I have a point of view. How should we understand this experience? The difference lies in the structure of awareness. It is usual to think of awareness as having what is known as an ‘act-object’ structure. On this model, to be aware of something involves an act of awareness that is directed at that thing. Perceptual awareness of things in the world has this structure. Seeing a table, e.g., involves an act of awareness that is directed at the table. Seeing Shmoo the cat involves an act of awareness that is directed at Shmoo. But there is an alternative way that awareness may be structured. On this account—what Moran (2001) calls the ‘adverbial model’—to be conscious of x does not involve an act of awareness directed at x. Instead, it describes the kind of thing or activity that x is—a conscious thing or activity. We can get some purchase on this idea if we consider what it is to dance joyfully. It is implausible to suppose that this should be analysed as involving an act of joy that is directed at one’s dancing. This implies that the dancing is independent from the joy, so that one could engage in the very same dancing, without its being joyful. One could dance sadly, e.g., by directing an act of sadness at the very same dancing.
The World and I 93 But this is surely wrong. To dance joyfully is for one’s dancing to have particular joyful qualities, which are different from those it has if one dances sadly. Thus a better analysis takes ‘joyfully’ to describe the way in which one dances, i.e., the sort of dancing it is. On the adverbial model of awareness, certain cases of what it is to be conscious of something are treated in the same way as joyful dancing. They do not involve acts of awareness that are directed at some thing or activity. Instead, ‘conscious’ describes the sort of thing or activity it is. The difference between the experience of being touched, and the experience of touching can be analysed using this distinction. My awareness of my touching hand has an adverbial structure. It does not consist in an act of awareness that is directed at my hand as its object. I am not, in other words, aware of my hand. Instead, I am conscious in, or better, my hand is sensitive. It follows that there is a form of bodily awareness that does not present me with my body as an object on which I have a perspective, because it is not, properly speaking, awareness of my body at all. Instead, it is awareness in my body, or my body’s sensitivity. My awareness in my body, or my body’s sensitivity, is the experience of the subject of perception (myself) as a bodily being. As such, it is awareness of myself as an embodied subject who is part of the world. This sense of myself as a part of the world is reinforced by what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the ‘double nature of sensations’. My experience of my body can switch between the two forms of awareness, so that the touched can become the touching, and vice versa. In this way, I experience myself, the touching subject, as something that—like all the worldly items I encounter—can be an object for touching, and as such, something that is located in, and part of a world of touchable objects. Merleau-Ponty’s account of how one experiences one’s point of view as embodied inserts the I back into the world. But it is not sufficient to completely dispel solipsism and capture the nature of non-schizophrenic experience. On his account so far, the subject is no longer a godlike perspective on the world but a flesh-and-blood part of it. However, recall that on Wittgenstein’s account, it is not just the elusiveness of the subject that leads to solipsism. Experience is also solipsistic because it is perspectival and to be aware of the world as laid out in space around one is to experience oneself as the centre of that world. The fact that one experiences one’s perspective as bodily does not alter the privileging of one’s own perspective as the zero point around which the world revolves. The solipsism that flows from having a point of view must be mitigated in non-schizophrenic experience by an awareness that somehow de-centres one’s own perspective. Merleau-Ponty holds that to de-centre the point from which I view the world, I must be able to occupy the perspective of others. As we saw earlier, I experience my point of view in perception as being the perspective of my body—I experience my point of view as embodied. Correlatively, to occupy the perspective of another must be to experience the other’s bodily perspective; it must be to inhabit the other’s body. Merleau-Ponty explains how this is possible with
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his account of the momentary transfer of one’s body schema to the bodies of others. Merleau-Ponty draws on Schilder’s (1950) work on the body image to make his case. Merleau-Ponty prefers the term ‘body schema’— schéma corporel —which emphasises its role in providing a framework for the subject’s experience of the world. In what follows, I will use his preferred terminology. For Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is one’s embodied sense of self; it is one’s bodily ‘grasp’ of the sort of creature one is. It comprises one’s motor abilities; one’s sense of how one appears from the outside; cultural beliefs the subject holds about her body; her emotional attitudes towards it; etc. The body schema can be usefully thought of as comprising two components: (i) a reasonably settled sense of oneself as an embodied creature of a certain sort, with particular properties; (ii) a continuous awareness of one’s changing posture as one moves through the world. The body schema is only partly available to consciousness. Whilst I have used the term ‘grasp’ to describe it, the above definition should make it clear that it is not wholly cognitive, although the subject’s thoughts about her body can enter into it. Similarly, whilst I have described it as the ‘sense’ one has of one’s body, it is not a wholly perceptual phenomenon either. There is clearly an essential connection between one’s body schema and the physical object that is one’s body. However, if the body schema simply tracks and reflects one’s physical body, then it is unclear how it could be transferred to another person. To understand how such a transfer is possible, we need to know more about the relation—as Merleau-Ponty conceives it—between one’s physical body and one’s body schema. His understanding of their relation is grounded in an important distinction: that between the living body ( Leib) and the objective body (Körper). The latter is the body conceived as a mere physical object, whilst the former is the body as the subject experiences and lives through it. The subject’s body is her means of being in the world. Her experience of it, therefore, is not awareness of an object separate from herself; it is her conscious inhabiting of the world. The fact that her body is her means of living in the world means that her body as she experiences it (her living body) does not simply follow the objective body’s contours. Moreover, this is not some defect in her bodily awareness (i.e., we should not class all such experiences as illusory) rather, this is what it is to live through the body. We can get some initial purchase on this idea by considering a different case: the experience of time passing. The units of time—seconds, minutes, hours—are uniform; each second (minute, hour) is the same length as any other. But one does not always experience them as uniform. It is a commonplace truism that time passes quickly when one is doing things one loves and drags when one is engaged in boring activity. More pronounced experiences of time stretching or speeding up often accompany the use of certain drugs. Such temporal experiences do not ‘match’ the uniformity of time’s units. But it would be odd to thereby class them all as illusory. We might class very extreme
The World and I 95 experiences of time’s stretching or compressing as illusory, but in the majority of cases we do not, because the stretching or compressing of time in different contexts just is the way that we live in time. Merleau-Ponty makes a roughly analogous claim about the subject’s experience of her own body. There may indeed be cases where the subject’s experience of her body is so different from its objective properties that it should be classed as illusory (an example might be cases of lycanthropy where the subject experiences herself as being a wolf). But in less extreme cases, we should not class bodily experience that does not exactly map on to the objective body’s properties as illusory because these differences are simply to do with the way that the body is lived. There are many examples to illustrate the way in which the subject’s experience of her own body does not exactly match its objective properties. I will provide just two here. The first is given by Schilder (1950). After injuring his hand in a car accident, he came to experience the space around it as having a special significance, so that his hand hurt if people came too close to it. Schilder states that after the accident, his sense of himself as an embodied subject changed so that it included a sense of his hand as vulnerable. He suggests that this illustrates a more general fact. The space immediately surrounding one’s physical body is experienced as part of the living body. Second, the subject lives her body partly as a collection of capacities for action. Her capacities can be extended through the use of tools. When the subject habitually uses a tool, her sense of herself expands to take in the tool, which is subsequently experienced as part of her embodied self, albeit temporarily. For example, just as one does not need to consciously calculate whether a gap is wide enough to walk through—one can immediately see whether or not one’s body will fit through it—so too, when one is practised at riding a bike, one can immediately see whether a gap between two bollards is wide enough to cycle through. Moreover, one can have proprioceptive (or perhaps quasi-proprioceptive) sensations in a tool. Schilder (1950) notes that the blind person senses the ground with the end of their stick in much the same way that one senses objects by touching them with one’s hands (or other parts of one’s body). He no longer feels the stick in his hands as an intermediary between himself and the world. Instead, sensations in his hands are immediately transformed to yield experience of the world at the surface of the stick. The body schema is bound up with the subject’s experience of her body. Component (ii) of the body schema is the continuous awareness of one’s changing posture as one moves through the world (i.e., it just is the ongoing experience of one’s body). Component (i) is the reasonably settled sense of oneself as an embodied creature of a certain sort. We can think of component (i) as affecting (ii) (and so affecting the experience of one’s body). In the case of Schilder’s injured hand, his (i) sense of himself as an embodied subject changed to include a sense of his hand as vulnerable. This then affected (ii) how he experienced his bodily self, so that the space around his hand
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took on a special significance for him. Similarly, we can think of a tool user’s (i) sense of herself altering as she becomes habituated to using the tool so that this then affects (ii) and she experiences the tool as a temporary part of her own body. The body schema’s role in bodily experience means that it is what underlies the living body. Since the living body does not exactly map on to the contours of the objective body, the body schema’s function cannot be to simply track and reflect the latter’s properties. The distinction between the living body and the objective body, and the body schema’s role in the former, opens up the possibility of the body schema’s expansion beyond the boundaries of the objective body. Indeed, this is what happens in the two examples given above. The body schema expands to encompass the space surrounding the objective body, and the tools habitually used by the subject. Merleau-Ponty continues by claiming that not only can the body schema be extended, it can also be momentarily transferred to the body of another subject. This allows the subject to perceive the world as for-the-other. To understand this claim, we need to know a little more about Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and the body schema’s role in it. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, never presents the perceiver with a ‘neutral’ world of things. Instead, she is confronted with an environment that solicits her to act in various ways. She sees food as inviting her to eat it; footballs appear to solicit kicking; and she perceives her dog as drawing her to stroke and feed him. Perception has this character because it involves the exercise of skills that have both a perceptual and motor component. Merleau-Ponty holds that when the perceiver acquires a motor skill—such as the ability to ride a bicycle—she also acquires the ability to perceive the world in certain ways. She can perceive certain environments as appropriate for exercising that skill. In the example given above, she perceives bikes as for riding, and different sorts of terrain as more or less appropriate for riding along. On this view, each perceptible object corresponds to a set of the perceiver’s motor capacities—those that can be used to interact with it. Actually perceiving the object involves using these motor capacities. We saw above that Merleau-Ponty takes the body schema to incorporate the body’s ‘sense’ of what it can do, so the body schema is partly constituted by the body’s motor abilities. Thus on his account, perceiving an object involves using one’s body schema. Merleau-Ponty then argues that when sees another subject, one’s body schema is transferred momentarily to that person. This allows one to see the surrounding world as soliciting the other to act: My gaze falls upon a living body performing an action and the objects that surround it immediately receive a new layer of signification: they are no longer merely what I could do with them, they are also what this behaviour is about to do with them. (PhP 369)
The World and I 97 Merleau-Ponty holds that to see the world as for-the-other in this way is to see the other as a centre of action, and so to see her as another subjectivity— another view of the world. Correspondingly, to see the world as for-theother is to see it as laid out around this other perspective. This decentres my own point of view, so that I no longer experience it as the zero point around which the world revolves. A vortex forms around the perceived body into which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, my world is no longer merely mine, it is no longer present only to me, it is present to X, to this other behaviour that begins to take shape in it. The other body is already no longer a simple fragment of the world, but rather . . . a certain ‘view’ of the world. A certain handling of things—which were until now mine alone—is taking place over there. Someone is using my familiar objects. But who? I say that it is another person, a second myself. (PhP 369–70)
4. Conclusion Both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein take there to be an important connection between having a perspective on the world and solipsism. MerleauPonty never makes this connection clear, but Wittgenstein offers an account of it. On his solipsistic picture, the I is a bare perspective on the world and cannot be identical with anything in it, including one’s body. One’s psychological life is part of the world on which one has a perspective, and no more or less ‘owned’ by me than other worldly events, such as cyclones and football matches. The world is my world because it is one that revolves around me—the insubstantial, godlike point of view at its centre. Wittgenstein’s solipsism beautifully captures certain experiences that are characteristic of schizophrenia, but it is incomplete on its own, since it does not provide an analysis of non-schizophrenic experience. Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily experience explains how the solipsism that flows from being a perspective on the world is mitigated in non-schizophrenic experience. In the latter, the subject does not experience herself as a bare point of view on the world. Instead, she experiences her point of view as embodied. This is made possible by adverbial awareness of her own body. Second, the subject is able to experience the world as revolving around other subjects through the momentary transfer of her body schema. This decentres her own perspective, so that she experiences the world as one that is equally shared by others.
Notes 1 I would like to thank audiences at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Sheffield, and Sussex University for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, which is improved as a result.
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2 The conception of the mind and body as distinct is usually associated with epistemological solipsism: the view that I cannot know that other minds exist. However, this lack of knowledge flows from the experiential situation. I cannot know that other minds exist because the only mind I can experience is my own. 3 See, e.g., Pears (1987, 1996), Diamond (1991, 2000). 4 This thesis is associated primarily with Wittgenstein’s later writings such as Philosophical Remarks, Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations. 5 Sass (1993) also suggests that Wittgenstein’s solipsism can be employed to make sense of certain important and puzzling aspects of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, space prevents me from engaging with his ideas here. However, it is worth noting an important difference between our accounts. Sass’s proposal is that the logic of schizophrenic thinking is analogous to the logic of Wittgenstein’s solipsism. My proposal, in contrast, is that Wittgenstein’s solipsism is a (partial) account of the structure of experience, which (partially) explains how certain kinds of schizophrenic experience have the character they do. I take it that this difference in our approaches means that mine is able to escape some of the criticisms leveled at Sass by Read (2001), although it is clear the latter would disagree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein offered here.
References Angyal, A. 1936. The experience of the body-self in schizophrenia. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 35 (5): 1029–1059. Anscombe, G. E. 1959. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Hutchinson University Library. Bell, D. 1996. Solipsism and subjectivity. European Journal of Philosophy 4 (2): 155–174. Carman, T. 2008. Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge. Diamond, C. 1991. The Realistic Spirit . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diamond, C. 2000. Ethics, imagination and the method of the Tractatus. In A. Crary and R. Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge, pp. 149–173. Hacker, P. 1986. Insight and Illusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, Revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Madison, G. B. 1981. The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Moran, R. 2001. Authority and Estrangement . Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morris, K. 2012. Starting with Merleau-Ponty. London: Continuum. Parnas, J. 2000. The self and intentionality in the pre-psychotic stages of schizophrenia. In D. Zahavi (ed.), Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 115–147. Pears, D. 1987. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pears, D. 1996. The originality of Wittgenstein’s investigation of solipsism. Euro pean Journal of Philosophy 4 (2): 124–136. Read, R. 2001. Approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein. Philosophical Psychology 14 (4): 449–475.
The World and I 99 Romdenh-Romluc, K. 2011. Routledge GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Rosser, R. 1979. The psychopathology of feeling and thinking in a schizophrenic. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 60: 177–188. Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, J. P. 1989. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by H. Barnes. London: Routledge. Sass, L. 1993. The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizo phrenic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sass, L. 1999. Schizophrenia, self-consciousness, and the modern mind. In S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds.), Models of the Self . Thorverton: Imprint Academic, pp. 319–341. Schilder, P. 1950. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. London: Routledge. Spitzer, M. 1990. On defining delusions. Comprehensive Psychiatry 31: 377–397. Stanghellini, G. 2004. Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision Taylor Carman
Henry Moore did not start by looking at his model. He started by looking at his stone. —E. H. Gombrich
‘Every theory of painting is a metaphysics,’ writes Merleau-Ponty in his last published work, Eye and Mind .1 His particular case in point is a passage in the Optics (Descartes 1985) in which Descartes seeks to undermine the Aristotelian-scholastic theory of sensible forms by severing (almost) all connection between pictorial representation and visible resemblance. Descartes observes (correctly) that pictures not only need not resemble their objects, but often represent them precisely by not resembling them: ‘You can see this in the case of engravings: consisting simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper, they represent to us forests, towns, people, and even battles and storms.’ In fact, an image cannot in principle resemble its object too closely, for if it did, ‘there would be no distinction between the object and its image’ (Descartes 1985: 113). Descartes’s larger argument in the context is that seeing an object cannot be a function of having in your mind a picture that resembles the object, since not even physical pictures represent things simply by resembling them. For a rationalist like Descartes, perceiving is thinking, and the unique force and directness with which images seem to impress us is an illusion of common sense, for ‘our mind can be stimulated by many things other than images—by signs and words, for example, which in no way resemble the things they signify’ (Descartes 1985: 112). Descartes’s critique of the scholastic image theory of perception is devastating, but his argument goes beyond that critique to the point of assimilating perception to cognition and blurring the distinction between pictures and symbols: ‘The magic of intentional species,’ Merleau-Ponty remarks, ‘loses its final argument if the entire potential of a painting is that of a text to be read, a text totally free of promiscuity between the seeing and the seen’ ( PrP 171). What is the ‘promiscuity’ of seeing? Merleau-Ponty expresses the same idea, though more chastely, when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 101 that ‘sensation is, literally, a communion’ of my body with my ‘existential environment’ (PhP 219). Unlike texts, pictures materially embody and enact vision’s free mingling with the visible, putting us in concrete contact with the world. Perception is our immersion in the inexhaustible expanse of visible reality that—far from being somehow ‘conceptual all the way out,’ as John McDowell puts it—engulfs us, beneath and beyond the reach of thought and representation (McDowell 1992: 8 n7, 11, 13, 42, 67, 69). That immersion is what Merleau-Ponty later called the ‘flesh’ ( chair) common to ourselves and the world we perceive, inhabit, and are part of. The perceptual environment is not the same as the space of reasons, and our unthinking identification with it is precisely what pictures, unlike mere signs, are able to evoke, so that we literally see in them—as opposed to reading off, deciphering, or inferring from them—something other than themselves. It is what allows pictures to show rather than merely say. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, that austere blend of logic and mysticism, seemingly worlds away from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological and aesthetic essays, also invokes a distinction between saying and showing. It is not exactly the distinction we find in Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible , but neither is it entirely different. Indeed, it seems to me, Wittgenstein’s concept of showing in the Tractatus sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s denial that perception is a form of cognition, and so too on his insight that the art of painting, both figurative and abstract, involves an evocation of the world that differs fundamentally both from discursive meaning and from the mere similarity of a picture to what it depicts. Painting, as Merleau-Ponty conceives it, summons up or makes manifest the world neither by describing nor by imitating it, but by embodying its visibility—not unlike the way in which propositions, according to Wittgenstein, mirror reality not by specifying or describing it correctly, but by ‘displaying’ or ‘exhibiting’ ( aufweisen) its logical form (TLP §4.12). An important clue to what Wittgenstein has in mind is the fact that he does not merely distinguish showing from saying but insists further that ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’ (TLP §4.1212). The kind of ‘showing’ he has in mind cannot therefore be our normal concept of depiction or illustration—that is, our ordinary notion of the representational content of an image, which often enough, after all, can also be stated or expressed. To mirror, display, or exhibit in Wittgenstein’s sense is instead something formal , something constitutive of the image’s being an image, its simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with its object, its uncanny ability to participate in what it represents while yet standing far enough apart from it as to be able to represent it. That distinctive perceptual manifestation of images, their necessarily unstated surplus or residue of visual presence, I want to suggest, is what Merleau-Ponty means by ‘promiscuity,’ or as he also says, ‘the metamorphosis of seeing and seen that defines both our flesh and the vocation of the painter’ ( PrP 168–9).
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The Tractatus is famous for advancing (or seeming to advance) a dvance) a ‘picture theory’ of meaning.2 On Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein’s account, sentences (or propositions, the German word Satz is ambiguous) have meaning, or say something, by representing (darstellen) possible states of affairs, which in turn constitute the world (‘The world is all that is the case’ ( TLP §1)). True propositions represent existent states of affairs, or what Wittgenstein calls ‘positive facts’ (TLP §2.06). Simply put, ‘A proposition is a picture of reality’ (TLP §4.021). In addition to representing the world, however, however, propositions also display, display, exhibit, or as Wittgenstein says, reflect or mirror ( spiegeln) ‘what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it— logical form’ (TLP §4.12). ‘Propositions cannot represent logical form’ ( TLP §4.12), but instead ‘show the logical form of reality’ (TLP §4.12). What some sentences—for example, A = A and S is p and not p— show show in their form is precisely that they cannot be showing the logical form of the world, and so cannot be stating facts of any kind: ‘tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing’ (TLP §4.461). Only in this technical sense of the word ‘show’ can Wittgenstein plausibly say, as he does emphatically, that what can be shown ‘cannot be be said’. Why not? What kind of showing not only differs from saying, but excludes it? In the ordinary sense of the word, a picture often ‘shows’ what can also be said—for example, George Washington, or George Washington Washington crossing the Delaware, maybe even the fact that George George Washington crossed the Delaware. How does it do so? By being a painting of or about the the person, the deed, the fact. In depicting what it depicts, however, however, the picture necessarily does something else, something in addition, namely, it presents itself as a picture. To represent anything, that is, the picture must also exhibit itself in such a way as to make manifest or plain that it it is a picture (of whatever it is a picture of). But that— what what it ‘shows’ in Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein’s sense—is not, indeed cannot be, what it represents. That it is a picture at all cannot be included in what it depicts. Or rather, rather, more precisely precisel y, if a picture does somehow some how manage mana ge to depict that it is a depiction of something, it can do so only by, by, again, manifesting itself, ‘showing’ itself in a way that is not contained in its representational content. Artworks often exhibit sophisticated forms of self-reference. Andy Warhol’s arhol’s Brillo Box is a classic example, at least on Arthur Danto’s suggestion that it poses a question about itself, namely, namely, the question, What makes it a work of art? (Danto 1964). Michelangelo’s Michelangelo’s ‘unfinished’ sculptures are another, another, since they are arguably not just sculptures of partially revealed human forms, but also sculptures of themselves revealing those forms. At a minimum, figurative sculptures depict forms by being sculptures, sculptures, by presenting themselves as sculpted representations. If Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave can be said to depict its own status as a sculpture, however, however, it must do so in some further way, for example by remaining—in dramatic contrast, say, to the highly polished Pietà—conspicuously unfinished, deliberately rough hewn so as to expose its own sculptedness. Could we suppose that not just its being a
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 103 sculpture, but moreover its remaining conspicuously unfinished is is also part of what it depicts? Perhaps, but it can depict that only only by manifesting or presenting itself in some other way yet again, which in turn must fall outside the scope of the depiction. If the sculpture comments on its own unfinishedness, for example, it does so (in part) simply by being made of marble—and that fact is is not something that marble can represent just by being marble. A chunk of marble is not a sculpture of a chunk of marble, just as a piece of paper is not a picture of a piece of paper. paper. A picture, an image of any kind, is always, cannot fail to be, more than what it depicts. The bare fact of a representation’s representation’s being a a representation at all, then, must manifest itself and as it were, go without saying: ‘A picture cannot . . . depict its pictorial form: it displays it’ ( TLP §2.172). So too, in contrast to its content, or what it says, a proposition must simply display or exhibit its logical form: ‘The rules of logical syntax must go without saying’ (TLP §3.334). Representations, that is, carry a surplus of exhibition, inasmuch as there is always more in how they manifest themselves than they can represent, more in what they show of themselves than they can say. It is that surplus of exhibition, that excess of manifestation over and beyond representation, that Wittgenstein has in mind with his concept of showing. Propositions can say something, can have meaning at all, only by showing themselves to be propositions without saying that they are, a re, just as pictures must simply show themselves to be pictures without somehow representing—being pictures of— that that fact. Keeping this essential fact about pictures in view helps stave off some persistent confusions concerning the nature of pictorial representation. One such confusion, as Descartes clearly understood, is the naïve (indeed absurd) idea that depiction just is similarity. Another, the intellectualist reaction that Merleau-Ponty finds in Descartes’s comments in the Optics (Descartes 1985) concerning engraving, is the temptation to conflate images with signs, the perceptual with the linguistic, to reduce visual depiction to discursive description, token pictures to symbol types. Both sorts of confusion, the mimetic and the symbolic conceptions of representation, are intimately bound up with traditional theories of perception. Aristotelians and empiricists sought to understand seeing on analogy with picturing: to see something is to have an image in your mind that resembles the object you see.3 Rationalists and intellectualists maintained, on the contrary, that experience, vision included, is a form of judgment, its content conceptual. According to contemporary theories of mind and language, perceptual content is literally symbolic, indeed computational. 4 Although the temptation to think of perceiving as somehow confronting (or perhaps drawing) a picture may be quite archaic, it gained much of its historical momentum from the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance painting. Ancient theorists did not know, for example, that the only thing that literally gets into our eyes in vision is light, not colours or sensible forms peeling away from objects, as it were, traversing the distance between
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them and us, and finally entering and inhabiting the soul. It therefore never occurred to them that a perceptual picture might have to be projected— somewhere, somehow—onto a flat surface, surface, as opposed to the round (outer) surface of the eye. 5 This was not a trivial difference, for it meant that they did understand, understand, contrary to the prescriptions of linear technique centuries later, later, that straight architectural lines often look curved, tapering or sagging in the middle, and that an object twice as far away occupies half the angle of what Euclid called the ‘visual cone,’ not half the distance along a flat perpendicular surface. 6 As Erwin Panofsky argued in his seminal essay Perspective as Symbolic Form (Panofsky 1991), the invention and refinement of linear perspective in the fifteenth century cannot therefore be understood simply as providing a closer, truer approximation to perceptual experience. It was instead an ingenious abstraction, a rationalization, a mathematization of visual space, an idealized reconstruction that has come to seem natural, indeed transpartransparent, to us only because our culture has so thoroughly absorbed and generalized the systematically unified conception of space that later flourished in modern philosophy and science, especially Descartes and Kant. The reputation for phenomenological correctness that linear perspective has enjoyed over the centuries, however, however, has wreaked w reaked havoc on theories of vision, most egregiously perhaps in Berkeley’s argument that we literally see a twodimensional mosaic of token images, and only then infer or impose upon it an additional idea of depth. Pictures, of course, are not mere copies of objects or simulations of visual experience.7 According to Pliny the Elder, Elder, Zeuxis, in a contest with Parrhasius, painted grapes so realistically that birds flew down to eat them. Invited to remove the curtain veiling Parrhasius’s painting, however, Zeuxis discovered that it was in fact a painting of a curtain. He had been fooled, and Parrhasius won the contest. Like the bird, Zeuxis failed to see the picture as a picture. One dollar bill is not a picture of the other, other, nor, nor, contrary to a common misconception, does pictorial representation normally aspire to trompe l’oeil . Extremely schematic stick figures in children’s drawings are pictures, even when they function more as conventional symbols than as visible v isible likenesses: a circle is a person’s head or the sun, a triangle is a tree or the roof of a house. Picturing, as Nelson Goodman argues, is at least in some minimal sense a semantic phenomenon: ‘Denotation is the core of representation and is independent of resemblance’ (1976: 5). Goodman is surely wrong, though, to assimilate pictures to conventional symbols as thoroughly as he does. Following Panofsky, Panofsky, he reminds us of the many ways in which linear perspective departs from and distorts real visual perception: it projects the scene onto a plane; it draws receding parallel lines, but often neither verticals nor horizontals, as converging; it substitutes a single, stationary, instantaneous point of view for our two eyes and mobile bodies. And so on. And yet, even if Goodman is right, as I think he is, to insist that linear (artificial ) perspective cannot claim to get it uniquely
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 105 right about how things visually appear to us, it is hard to deny that it is at least one way of getting it right about some of the structures inherent in real (natural ) perspective. As J. J. Gibson has said, ‘it is one thing to argue that perspective is not necessary for a painting, but it is quite another to say that perspective is a language’ (1986: 285). Artificial linear perspective is a convention, but it is also a genuine innovation, since it does indeed mimic—if only instantaneously and for a single, motionless eye—what Gibson calls the ‘ambient array’ of light, which, according to his ‘ecological optics,’ provides the structural invariants that allow us to see (and more essentially, see our way around in) the practical environment. Properly visual information, Gibson insists, ‘is not explicit. The invariants cannot be put into words or symbols’ (1986: 285). Gibson, for his part, has been widely criticized for failing to recognize the depth of the contribution we ourselves make to what we see, in contrast to what the environment provides by way of lighting and scenery. That criticism often comes from proponents of cognitivist theories of perception, according to which what we contribute to vision is something like conceptual thought or information processing. But one needn’t be an intellectualist or computationalist to suspect that Gibson has indeed underestimated the role of our own spontaneity in perception, particularly what we might call the imaginative dimension of visual experience, over and beyond its mere responsiveness to given optical invariants. Like Gibson, Arthur Danto rejects Goodman’s conventionalism by observing that some of the same ‘ “perceptual pathways” are involved in learning to recognize pictures of things the outlines of which are learned in the perception of those things as such’ (Danto 1999: 114). Children who grow up in a picture-free environment have little trouble recognizing things in pictures on first viewing, and apparently even pigeons can sort some pictures according to what they depict—or perhaps we should say, just as they sort the objects depicted in the pictures. 8 More to the point, Danto observes, ‘sentences, unlike pictures, are in a language,’ and languages, at least in lexicon and surface grammar, are conventional, whereas the ability to recognize things depicted in pictures appears to be, at least in part, an innate capacity (Danto 1999: 116). Danto’s purpose is twofold. His main thesis is that while Wittgenstein might well be right that there are things that can be shown but not said, there are also things that can be said but not shown. His example is negative facts (think of Sartre’s example of seeing that Pierre is not in the café), but he could as easily have mentioned conjunction, disjunction, conditionals, quantifiers, and tense. (Try drawing a picture of the fact that if Pierre is not in the café, then I will have to borrow money from someone else.) But Danto also wants to distinguish what we might call ‘brute pigeon perception’ from our distinctively human ability to ‘read’ rather than merely see pictures, an ability essential to our identifying some pictures as works of art, that is, as artefacts demanding a special kind of interpretation and so enjoying a
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special status as art works—as, in Danto’s words, transfigured rather than merely commonplace (Danto 1983). But the distinction between pigeon perception on the one hand, and the interpretation of art works on the other, leaves out something crucial in between: our mundane recognition of pictures as pictures. Danto writes, ‘it is difficult to see in what way pictorial competence can differ from what one might call perceptual competence’ (Danto 1999: 114). And yet what is distinctive of human beings, in contrast to pigeons, and even other higher apes, is precisely our ordinary perceptual grasp of the duality of pictures, that is, their both having representational content and being perceptible things in their own right.9 This basic grasp of pictures as pictures is unique to human beings, yet far more elementary than the specialized practice of interpreting works of art. Basic pictorial understanding requires a kind of intelligence that goes beyond the mere animal ability to recognize things depicted in pictures, yet falls short of our hermeneutical understanding of things belonging to that special ontological space that Danto calls ‘the artworld.’ It may well be that human beings have an innate capacity not only to recognize things depicted in pictures, a capacity we share with pigeons, but also to recognize pictures as pictures of something, even very schematic combinations of lines and dots as faces, for example. Yet it is also surely true that many pictures, both paintings and photographs, represent their objects by means of stylized conventions, that there are culturally variable vocabularies and grammars of depiction, and that we are not born with but acquire, or even learn, the skills necessary for seeing them properly. Appreciating Impressionism as a challenge to traditional concepts and techniques of painting is an achievement of aesthetic understanding, but even recognizing Monet’s water lily paintings as paintings of water lilies might require some prompting and demonstration, perhaps by the titles of the paintings themselves—not to mention some prior familiarity with ponds and water lilies. And yet Monet’s images are indeed visual images. Their intelligibility is a specifically visual kind of intelligibility. They are not mere symbols. Like linear perspective, Impressionism is a stylized convention, but not literally a language. What all this shows is that the dilemma we seem to face in conceiving of pictures as either mere duplicates or reiterations of perception on the one hand, or as thoroughly conventional symbol systems on the other—that is, as either mechanical copies of visual experience or as arbitrarily contrived languages—is a false dilemma. Merleau-Ponty, both in his phenomenological account of perception and in his remarks on painting and language, bypasses that dilemma and advances an original and plausible conception of pictorial representation that recognizes its essential semantic basis and yet maintains a robust distinction between images and signs. Moreover, he maintains that both pictures and symbols occupy a continuum extending from direct, concrete involvement with the world to more and more remote, transparent forms of depiction and description.
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 107 The world is at once perceptual and conceptual, conducive to both picturing and speaking, neither of which is essentially closer to or farther from the world they mutually articulate. Each, however, may be relatively at grips and expressively engaged with the world or—with increasing reflection and calculation—more objective, either correct or incorrect. In The Voices of Silence, the 1951 edition of his four volumes of art history and criticism originally published together under the title, The Psychology of Art , André Malraux maintains that all artistic productions ‘speak for the same endeavor; it is as though an unseen presence, the spirit of art, were urging all on the same quest’ (1978: 46). In his great essay, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, Merleau-Ponty replies that this can only be half right, at best. For while it is true that all art forms are expressive, visual, and linguistic expression differ not just in the means or materials available to them, but in the very relations in which they stand to the world. Malraux criticizes the ‘objectivist prejudice’ according to which meaning simply adheres to things, awaiting reflection or imitation in art or language. He is right that meaning is not an objective property of things, but neither does it lie solely in the subjective moment of creative expression. Perhaps, Merleau-Ponty suggests, Malraux ‘has not measured how deeply the prejudice is rooted. Perhaps he was too quick to concede the domain of the visible world to it’ (S 47). To get clear about the relation between images and words, and so between visual art and literature, we must distinguish between two questions. First, how is visual art rooted in the mute, nonsymbolic world of ordinary experience? Second, how does visual art nevertheless acquire at least some of the expressiveness of language and literature? These two questions can be collapsed into a single question, implicit in all of Merleau-Ponty’s essays on painting—namely, how does visual art manage to speak to us? MerleauPonty says, ‘language speaks, and the voices of painting are the voices of silence’ (S 81). Is the phrase ‘voices of silence’ more than an oxymoron? Insisting on a fundamental distinction between visual and symbolic content, Gibson writes, ‘There is no way of describing the awareness of being in the environment at a certain place. Novelists attempt it, of course, but they cannot put you in the picture in anything like the way the painter can’ (1986: 285). The nonsymbolic content of vision differs essentially from the symbolic content of language. Gibson’s remark raises the question, how are visual works of art able to capture our concrete sense of being somewhere, given that they are neither reenactments of full-fledged visual experiences nor mere signs? I think Merleau-Ponty would agree with Gibson that there is a fundamental difference between pictures and symbols, for while linguistic signs rely on general and abstract terms, images are bound to the concrete scenes they depict. Language does not just reveal, it also refers arbitrarily: ‘a statement purports to reveal the thing itself, it goes beyond itself toward what it signifies’ (S 81). Language has something in common with ‘mute forms of
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expression such as gestures or paintings’ ( S 81), yet it differs from them in allowing (at least approximate) synonymy, ‘the substitution of equivalent meanings (sens)’ ( S 81). Painting and perception, by contrast, are inarticulate, for they do not admit of the substitutivity of terms. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty insists, painting does after all have a kind of voice, somehow akin to literature, and he is, in the end, less interested in how they differ than in what they have in common, namely, ‘the phenomenon of expression’ (SNS 20). In exploring their rootedness in perception, he wants to rescue them from the false dichotomy between the (supposedly) bare givens of sense experience and the (supposedly) pure abstractions of the intellect. Perception is not a dumb confrontation with sensory input, and ‘no thought ever detaches itself entirely from a support’ in our concrete relation to the world (PrP 189). To see the wrongness of those distorted images of perception and cognition, we need to appreciate the primitive expressive intelligence at work in both vision and language, and in both art and literature. We need to look beneath the difference between perceptual and semantic content to see their common origins in expression and style. Consider language. Language is not just an abstract system of signs. According to the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, signifiers signify only in virtue of the system of differences among them, never by directly expressing some discrete semantic content. And yet, Merleau-Ponty insists, our experience of speaking and listening testifies to ‘the power speaking subjects have of going beyond signs toward their meaning ( sens). Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us, on and on without end, nor is language like a prison we are locked up in’ ( S 81). We experience and understand language as opening us onto a world , and no theory of syntax or semantics should tempt us to dismiss that experience as an illusion. Putting words together in speech is not just a matter of manipulating symbols according to an algorithm but is more like painting. For both speaking and painting are ways of evoking , ways of rendering things freshly visible. The writer’s task, Merleau-Ponty says, is to apprehend and make the world manifest through language, and in this sense, ‘his procedure is not so different from the painter’s’ ( S 45). We might suppose that a painting is mere colour and line and cannot say anything, unlike a poem or a novel, which is composed of an established system of signs. Yet language is meaningful not just as a function of the combination of signifiers, but thanks to quasiperceptual effects such as mood, inflection, and silence. Speech emerges against ‘a background of silence that does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing’ (S 46). Spoken language is ‘simply the highest point of a tacit and implicit accumulation of the same sort as painting. . . . Like a painting, a novel expresses tacitly’ ( S 76). The silent significance of Julien’s actions in The Red and the Black, for example, is ‘not in the words at all: it is between them, in the hollows of space, time, and signification they mark out, just as movement at the cinema is between the stationary images that follow one another’ (S 76). Literary language has a ‘halo of signification’ comparable to ‘the mute radiance of painting’ ( S 78).
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 109 In addition to the explicit, articulate language of words and sentences, Merleau-Ponty therefore maintains, ‘there is a tacit language, and painting speaks in this way’ ( S 47). Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence is dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre and can also be read as a reply to his essay, What Is Literature? (Sartre 1988). There Sartre draws a sharp distinction between art and writing, poetry and prose. The artist is concerned only with appearances. ‘He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colors and signs as a lan guage’ (Sartre 1988: 26). Like Merleau-Ponty, Sartre observes that linguistic meaning permits the synonymy of different expressions: ‘the significance of a melody—if one can still speak of significance—is nothing outside the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways’ (Sartre 1988: 27). Language is an instrument for disclosing facts, truths about the way the world is, whereas painting merely uncovers the appearance of concrete particulars: ‘The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that’s all’ (Sartre 1988: 27). Sartre’s distinction, however, is not between linguistic and visual representation as such, but between significative and aesthetic uses of representation, between denotation and decoration, prose and poetry: ‘The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music. . . . Poets are men who refuse to utilize language,’ for the poetic attitude ‘considers words as things and not as signs’ (Sartre 1988: 28–9). Merleau-Ponty rejects Sartre’s distinction by insisting, first, that visual arts like painting and sculpture do have a kind of voice of their own, that they never merely display, but also (so to speak) speak of the things they show; and second, that no use of language, no matter how artless or prosaic, is literally without style, a mere transparent signifying instrument. What vision and painting, art and literature, poetry and prose all share is a way of seeing, a character, a style. Even our normal ways of seeing and hearing, not to mention watching and listening, are imbued with a certain character. Prior to any special effort, ‘perception already stylizes’ ( S 54). How? By means of an ‘inner schema’ (S 53), a ‘system of equivalences’ ( S 54) that coordinates one’s grip on things and allows the world to reveal itself as coherent and intelligible. The body schema is a bundle of flexible but enduring dispositions that organize ordinary perception and behaviour. Likewise, there are more refined acquired schemas that generate the styles immediately recognizable in artistic works. So, for example, Our handwriting is recognizable whether we trace letters on paper with three fingers of our hand or in chalk on the blackboard at arm’s length, for it is not a purely mechanical movement of our body . . . but a general power of motor formulation capable of the transpositions that make up the constancy of style. (S 65)
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Expression—affective, linguistic, or artistic—presupposes a world given in perception, yet perception itself always already has expressive significance of its own, for the body brings a distinct style of comportment to its apprehension of what it perceives: ‘if expression recreates and transforms, the same was already true . . . of our perception of the world before painting, since that perception already marked things with the trace of human elaboration’ (S 59). We each find ourselves with subtly unique and individually recognizable ways of walking, talking, and seeing things, and the creative expression of artists is a further deliberate refinement of those characteristic dispositions: ‘For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he sets up for himself’ (S 54). Creative expression takes place not in the artist’s mind, but in her concrete engagement with the world: The work is not brought to fulfillment far from things and in some intimate laboratory to which the painter and the painter alone has the key. . . . he always goes back to his world, as if the principle of the equivalences by means of which he is going to manifest it had been buried there since the beginning of time. (S 55) The cultivated body schema of the artist is a kind of second nature, a set of acquired yet spontaneous skills, skills that come to feel natural though they are in fact products of years of effort and practice. Carving out a unique artistic style worthy of the name, over and beyond one’s everyday personal style of moving and speaking, is like learning a second language. MerleauPonty therefore refers to ‘the painter’s labor and study, that effort that is so like an effort of thought and that allows us to speak of a language of painting’ (S 55). If painting can be called a kind of language, it is a language learned with reference to the more primitive means of expression inherent in ordinary perceptual behaviour. Vision is itself already essentially expressive, for it always has its own bodily character, its own style. It is no more a brutally given natural fact than any (so-called) ‘natural’ language, no more fixed and surveyable in all its possible forms and purposes. Like speech, vision ‘moves itself, a means that invents its own ends’ (PrP 165). This is why painting can never simply duplicate the structure and content of visual experience. Even Renaissance painters knew that their perspectiva artificialis was not simply a copy of perception, ‘that no technique of perspective is an exact solution,’ that linear perspective is not a uniquely correct mode of representation, but rather ‘opened several pathways for painting’ (PrP 174). Painting is a mode of creative expression, not a means of technically reproducing what we see in our actual bodily engagement with the world: ‘Geometrical perspective is no more the only way of looking at the sensible world than the classical portrait is the only view of man’ ( PW 53).
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 111 It is worth noting that since painting almost inevitably acquires and generates symbolic content of some kind, it can never simply capture the content of visual perception with no additional symbolic import. Images and icons are always more or less bound up with discourse in such a way that they never merely reveal the world, but also always allude, refer, indicate, and comment. Consequently, ‘no means of expression, once mastered, resolves the problems of painting or transforms it into a technique, for no symbolic form ever functions as a stimulus’ ( PrP 175). Malraux is therefore right to deny that meaning simply inheres in the world, that there is a kind of natural language of things, which the arts simply echo or reflect. Unfortunately, he counters that crude objectivist prejudice, which he thinks defined classical art, with an equally crude subjectivist interpretation of modern art as withdrawing from all concrete engagement with the world and retreating into an inner sanctum of subjectivity, into ‘a secret life outside the world’ ( S 47). Merleau-Ponty considers that dialectical reversal not just internally incoherent, but wrong even as a description of the works of art Malraux discusses. The difference between classical and modern painting cannot be understood as the difference between objective and subjective. Abstract painting, for example, is in no way detached or removed from the visible world. Instead, visible features of a representationally indeterminate picture suggest or evoke a palpable visible presence—a hint of depth, space, distance, light or shadow, coolness or warmth, perhaps weight, fragility, softness, inflexibility, brittleness—yet without specifying any thing, property, or even kind of thing as the object of depiction. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, even Piet Mondrian’s austere black lines and coloured rectangles, though they shed all trace of representational character and float free of specific objective reference, still nonetheless manifestly evoke and bring forth in their own visible presence the visible presence of the external world. There is nothing essentially ‘subjective’ about that. Or better, like Byzantine icon painting and classical perspective, abstract art was always as objective as it was subjective, as outwardly world-directed as it was spiritual and interior. Not surprisingly, Malraux’s flawed notion of the subjectivity of modern art is parasitic on a correspondingly flawed notion of the objectivity of classical styles. Malraux assumes that sensory input as such has remained more or less constant through history and so conceives of the classical ideal as an effort to reflect and reproduce that input. As Merleau-Ponty argues at length in Phenomenology of Perception, however, the very idea of determinately given sense data is confused, for it is meant to satisfy two competing, often conflicting, identity criteria: that of the sensory stimulus and that of the phenomenal appearance. The moon looks bigger on the horizon than at its zenith, though its angular diameter, hence stimulus value, remains constant. So, how big does it really look? Classical painters cannot simply have been trying to mimic or duplicate the world. Instead, Merleau-Ponty writes, following Panofsky, ‘classical
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perspective is just one of the ways man has invented for projecting the perceived world before him, it is not the copy of that world. It is an optional interpretation of spontaneous vision’ ( S 48–9). Granted, some paintings approximate the formal and material properties of natural vision more closely than others. But this is like saying that some particular pieces of music express emotion better than others. That is true, but it does not imply that there is a single musical form or tradition best suited to the expression of emotion. Neither is there a single aesthetic style best suited to the evocation of visual experience. Given some artistic techniques and resources, one can always do better or worse, but nature does not—indeed cannot —prefer one style over others a priori. Pictures depict; they do not literally describe. Nor do they depict by describing, as language does. Instead, they express—or better yet, they present and depict by expressing—the non-symbolic significance things have for us in perception thanks to the stylized expressive habits of our bodily skills. More precisely, pictures present and depict the visible world by transposing perceptual meanings from their original sensorimotor terms into the largely conventional idioms of pictorial practice. No doubt expression has natural origins in instinctive behaviour, but any transposition of the spatial world of perception onto the flat surface of a picture is also necessarily conventional, beholden to its object yet at the same time, at least in part, arbitrary.
Notes 1 Published in Primacy of Perception, 159–90. 2 As Hans Sluga points out, the picture theory was Bertrand Russell’s before it was (or seemed to be) Wittgenstein’s. I say ‘seeming’ and ‘seemed’ because, as Sluga says, Wittgenstein would have rejected the word ‘theory’ as a characterization of his own view (Sluga 2011: 37 n14). 3 Although Hume conceives of experience generally in terms of images, his use of the word ‘impression’ is a vestige of Aristotelian theories of perception that took the sense of touch rather than sight as their paradigm. 4 Jerry Fodor, for instance, candidly acknowledges the ‘Way of Ideas’ pedigree of his own computational theory of intentionality as involving a ‘Language of Thought’ syntactically realized in the brain: ‘To a first approximation, the idea that there are mental representations is the idea that there are Ideas minus the idea that Ideas are images’ (Fodor 1998: 8). 5 The round inner surface of the retina, which seemed to serve as a projection screen inside the camera obscura of the eyeball, was unknown before Kepler. 6 Repeated doublings of, say, the width of a figure on a picture plane will not correspond to doublings of the angle of the visual cone, since each enlargement of the figure out to the edges of the (flat) picture will require a smaller and smaller peripheral increase in the angle of view. The two values would correspond only if the picture surface were a concave sphere. See Panofsky (1991). 7 Moreover, to argue that a picture is either a copy of an object or the simulation of a visual experience would of course undermine the image-theory of perception, since that theory is predicated on the idea that we understand perception better by referring it back to the supposedly more basic concept of a picture. If pictures then turn out to be replicas of objects or perceptions, we are moving in a circle.
Painting and the Promiscuity of Vision 113 8 On picture-deprived children, see Hochberg (1972: 70), cited in Danto (1999: 112). On pigeons, see Herrnstein et al. (1976), cited in Danto (1999: 113). 9 See Gibson (1986: 281–3). The distinction corresponds roughly to the distinction Descartes draws between the objective and the formal reality of an idea, that is, its representational content and its intrinsic character.
References Danto, A. 1964. The artworld. The Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–584. Danto, A. 1983. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danto, A. 1999. Depiction and description. In his The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 98–121. (Originally published in 1982, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1): 1–18.) Descartes, R. 1985. Optics, IV. In John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (eds. and trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–66. Fodor, J. 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gibson, J. J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Goodman, N. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols . Indianapolis: Hackett. Herrnstein, R. J., Loveland, D. H. and Cable, C. 1976. Natural concepts in pigeons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 2 (4): 285–301. Hochberg, J. 1972. The representation of things and people. In E. H. Gombrich, J. Hochberg, and M. Black (eds.), Art, Perception, and Reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 47–94. Malraux, A. 1978. The Voices of Silence. Translated by S. Gilbert. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McDowell, J. 1992. Mind and World . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Panofsky, E. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by C. S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Sartre, J. P. 1988. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Edited by S. Unga. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sluga, H. 2011. Wittgenstein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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The Recovery of Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein1 David R. Cerbone
1. Negative Indeterminacy: Quine Within philosophy, the discovery or acknowledgement of indeterminacy2 is generally regarded as something negative, a revelation often offered with the aim of debunking some cherished idea or ideal and meant to be greeted with disappointment.3 Consider the most famous example in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy: Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. As developed in the second chapter of Word and Object (Quine 1960) and subsequently revisited and defended throughout his writings, Quine’s thesis is that for any ‘target language’ it is possible to construct two or more mutually incompatible manuals for translating that language into a second, home (for the translator) language. Quine further claims that when it comes to adjudicating between such rival manuals, there is no fact of the matter as to which of the two or more rivals is the correct manual; each of the manuals is equally compatible with all observed and observable data, and so translation is in principle indeterminate. For Quine, this is not merely a conclusion about translation, such that it is a problem only for field linguists and the like; rather, the saga of the field linguist sheds light on the phenomenon of meaning as such. That translation is indeterminate shows more generally that questions of meaning—of sameness of meaning—are not fully or properly objective; or to put it a little differently, the extent to which such questions can be answered objectively leaves a great deal in the way of slack. The merits and import of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis are not my principal concern, although I will have more to say about Quine at the close of the paper. I appeal to the thesis initially only to register the intended effect of the thesis, namely to dislodge from their pedestal various ideas about semantic determinacy, what Quine dubs ‘the museum myth of meaning.’ Insofar as any version of such a ‘myth’ had been, prior to Quine’s argument, treated as doctrine (or at least an intuition underwriting a more refined doctrine), his pronouncement comes as a shock, as accepting it requires giving up ideas to which one had previously been committed. The recognition of indeterminacy means making do with less in terms of one’s conception of linguistic meaning, and along with it various ways of thinking about speech, language learning, understanding, and even mentality itself.
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 115 Rather than Quine, my interest in this paper lies in exploring various claims to indeterminacy as they appear in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Although there is an element of demythologization attached to these claims, especially in the case of Wittgenstein, they are at the same time developed and insisted upon in a more positively charged spirit. Merleau-Ponty says as much at the very outset of Phenomenology of Perception, when he declares that ‘we must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon’ ( PhP 7).4 Rather than a disappointing or demythologizing discovery, both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty hope to foster the recovery of indeterminacy, as something to be acknowledged and appreciated, rather than something to be settled for in lieu of a preferable, though perhaps unattainable, alternative.5 Both the particular notion of indeterminacy and the more general idea that the goal of philosophy involves recovery mark an affinity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty characterize their respective philosophical projects as struggling to overcome a sense of captivity and captivation (by what Wittgenstein calls ‘pictures’ and what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘prejudices’) and a correlative quest for liberation, which in each case involves a kind of recollection or return: What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (PI I §116) [W]e must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. (PhP lxxii) And what is ‘reawakened’ or recovered is not something heretofore undiscovered or arcane, but something familiar and proximate. As Wittgenstein notes: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something— because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at one time struck them.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful. (PI I § 129) Similarly, Merleau-Ponty wants to call attention to something that serves as ‘an immediate source and as the final authority of our knowledge’ (PhP 24).6 This kind of immediacy—of something ‘always before one’s eyes’—invites the question of just why such a task should be difficult . Wittgenstein’s adducing of a kind of ‘paradox of proximity’ is no doubt part of
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the answer: we are so immersed in our language (our perceptual experience) that we look right through or past it, but the difficulty is compounded by the fact that what we look past it to is itself prepared for or projected by language and experience in a way that conceals or covers over that projective process. Compare: A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably. (PI I § 115) And: Thus is formed ‘objective’ thought (in Kierkegaard’s sense)—the objective thought of common sense and of science—which in the end makes us lose contact with the perceptual experience of which it is nevertheless the result and the natural continuation. (PhP 74) Each of these passages registers a loss of ‘contact’ (with language, with perception) as a source of the difficulty of their respective projects, where the very phenomena to be recovered facilitate that loss in the first place: objective thought is the ‘natural sequel’ of perceptual experience, just as the captivating ‘pictures’ that concern Wittgenstein lie in ‘our language.’ What these programmatic remarks suggest is that properly appreciating the place of indeterminacy in experience and language faces considerable challenges, since language and experience themselves insinuate ideals of determinacy and objectivity that need to be unmasked. The very ways in which we see the world, follow rules, and apply concepts reinforce a sense of completeness, a sense that ‘all the steps are really already taken’ ( PI I § 219), and the perceived object is ‘the reason for all the experiences of it that we have had or that we could have’ ( PhP 69). With these challenges in mind, let us examine how both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty work to bring the phenomenon of indeterminacy into view. While not clearly separated in either Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty, I want to explore the recovery of indeterminacy by separating a number of moments or steps. The most basic are descriptions that serve as demonstrations or recollections of indeterminacy as it is manifest in perceiving, speaking, and understanding. This is what I call simply the fact of indeterminacy. Once one begins looking for it, indeterminacy pervades our experience and our use of language. The second, and more difficult, step is recalibrating the response to this fact, so as not to be disappointed with its pervasiveness and so see it as something to be overcome or eliminated (at least in principle). (It is one thing to be brought back to the ‘rough ground,’ but quite another to be happy about such a return.) The second step divides into two further steps or stages: first, a critique of the ideals against which
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 117 the fact of indeterminacy is to be found wanting, and second, reminders concerning the positive dimensions of indeterminacy, its standing as a genuinely ‘positive phenomenon.’ In the final section of the paper, I will return briefly to Quine’s indeterminacy thesis in order to illustrate just how little can separate positive and negative receptions of the discovery (or recovery) of indeterminacy.
2. The Fact of Indeterminacy I have already noted the early appearance of the theme of indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty, appearing as it does in the opening pages of Phenomenology of Perception. This early insistence is due in part to the oppositional structure of his examination, wherein his own phenomenology of perception is developed in conjunction with a critique of dominant views that are in various ways oblivious to just those dimensions of perception (and later embodiment) his phenomenology emphasizes. Gripped by objective thought, none of the views Merleau-Ponty opposes can adequately accommodate the most basic dimensions of perceptual experience: ‘The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a “field” ’ (PhP 4). Such a field is informed by determinate and indeterminate dimensions, a determinate figure against a variously indeterminate background. I look at the stapler on my desk to the right of my computer screen. The surrounding objects and the region of my study still visible do not simply disappear, but recede into the background, there to be seen but only partially and indistinctly manifest while I focus on the stapler: ‘In this region there is an indeterminate vision, a vision of something or other ’ (PhP 6). Should I shift my gaze, one or more of the background objects will become clearly delineated in my visual field, while the stapler quietly cedes its foreground position. Avoiding my computer screen with its expanse of a mostly blank Word document, I can idly explore the surrounding desk and its denizens, moving effortlessly from one to the next with only slight movements of my eyes and head. While doing so, the foreground-background relationship is changing throughout, but in entirely unsurprising ways: what comes into view is already seen as ‘waiting in the wings’ to then take centre stage as I attend to it more closely. This kind of push and pull of visual experience—of things emerging and receding from view—exemplifies what I referred to above as the fact of indeterminacy, which any descriptively adequate account of perceptual experience must acknowledge. The fact of indeterminacy is likewise a pervasive theme of the Philosophical Investigations. Indeed, I would contend that the notion of indeterminacy appears in the very first section of the Investigations, immediately after the quotation from Augustine. At the close of Wittgenstein’s first vignette involving the purchase of apples from a chartwielding shopkeeper, he remarks: ‘It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words’ (PI § 1). This remark’s ‘and similar ways’ is a gesture
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toward indeterminacy in that the range of similar ways is in no way fixed or fixable. This initial gesture is developed in subsequent remarks, especially in the teens and twenties, for example in Wittgenstein’s likening of language to a slowly evolving and expanding town in PI § 18 and his responding in PI § 23 to the question, ‘But how many kinds of sentence are there?’ with, ‘There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs”, “words”, “sentences”.’ Wittgenstein continues: ‘And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten.’ These preliminary remarks, which begin to expose and challenge the impulses and assumptions underlying various philosophical approaches to language, sound themes that are taken up in more detail later in the text. Most notably for our purposes, PI § 65 finds Wittgenstein returning to the question of what constitutes language—its essence—and again appealing to an unfixed diversity of types of language: ‘Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all—but there are many different kinds of affinity between them.’ Wittgenstein continues by introducing the notion of ‘family resemblance.’ In doing so, the notion of indeterminacy emerges as a central concern: family resemblance words such as ‘game’ are offered as easy or obvious examples of linguistic indeterminacy. Lacking anything like ‘necessary and sufficient conditions,’ the concept game is ‘ not closed by a boundary’ (PI I §68). Fluent speakers of English who by and large agree on what things are games and what are not may also reasonably disagree about whether some more peripheral activity is a game without thereby displaying any sort of linguistic incompetence, while new activities will be called—understood to be—games that were not, and perhaps could not have been, envisaged and so anticipated by prior uses of the word: ‘What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this never bothered you when you used the word “game”.)’ (PI I § 68). Wittgenstein continues by distinguishing between the rather hysterical charge that our use of the word ‘game’ is ‘unregulated,’ which suggests a kind of anything-goes arbitrariness to its usage, and the calmer observation that ‘game’ is not ‘everywhere bounded by rules’. The word ‘game’ has, we might say, a certain degree of play in it. That we have never been ‘bothered’ about the absence of boundaries with respect to words like ‘game’ again exemplifies the fact of indeterminacy: we carry on in our linguistic practices with words that are not ‘everywhere bounded by rules,’ and for the most part, we manage to communicate with one another without a great deal of stress and strain (the significance of our so managing will be considered more closely later in our discussion). ‘One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges’ (PI I §71),
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 119 and having blurred edges does not thereby render the concept unusable or invalid: Frege compares a concept to a region, and says that a region without clear boundaries can’t be called a region at all. This presumably means we can’t do anything with it.—But is it senseless to say ‘Stand roughly here’? Imagine that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it, I do not bother drawing any boundary, but just make a pointing gesture—as if I were indicating a particular spot. And this is just how one might explain what a game is. (PI I §71) Although Wittgenstein’s introduction of the notion of family resemblance and his extended discussion of ‘game’ suggests that he is gesturing toward, and defending the legitimacy of, a particular kind or range of concepts— family resemblance concepts, in distinction to some other varieties—how the discussion develops instead indicates that the notion of not being ‘everywhere bounded by rules’ ramifies through our linguistic practices more generally. This is indicated by the subsequent discussion of proper names via the example of ‘Moses,’ where there is no saying just which—or how many— descriptions typically adduced to identify Moses I am ‘ready to substitute’ when one or another I have offered has been challenged. Instead: ‘I shall perhaps say: By “Moses” I mean the man who did what the Bible relates of Moses, or at any rate much of it. But how much? Have I decided how much must turn out to be false for me to give up my proposition as false?’ Rather than insisting that the ‘use of the name “Moses” is fixed and determined for all possible cases,’ Wittgenstein suggests: ‘Isn’t it like this, that I have, so to speak, a whole series of props in readiness, and am ready to lean on one if another should be taken from under me, and vice versa?’ ( PI I § 79). The notion of ‘all possible cases’ is further interrogated in the next remark, wherein Wittgenstein shifts from proper names to our common nouns for common objects. Here we are asked to consider a curiously disappearing and reappearing chair: I say, ‘There is a chair over there’. What if I go to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight—‘So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion.’— But a few seconds later, we see it again and are able to touch it, and so on.—‘So the chair was there after all, and its disappearance was some kind of illusion.’—But suppose that after a time it disappears again—or seems to disappear. What are to say now? Have you rules ready for such cases—rules saying whether such a thing is still to be called a ‘chair’? But do we miss them when we use the word ‘chair’? And are we to say that we do not really attach a meaning to this word, because we are not equipped with rules for every possible application of it? (PI I § 80)
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All three of the questions that close this remark are meant, I take it, to be answered in the negative. We do not have rules at the ready for settling the question of what to call the remarkable chair-like entity (or simulacrum) Wittgenstein here describes, but the word ‘chair’ is not rendered meaningless because ‘we are not equipped with rules for every possible application’. And of course there is nothing special about chairs: outlandish situations can be adduced where the application of pretty much any common and familiar word will become hazy, and we will either be at a loss for words or disagree about what to say.7
3. The Ineliminability of Indeterminacy Even if there is something compelling at the descriptive level to both Merleau-Ponty’s and Wittgenstein’s appeals to indeterminacy, such that we are prepared to acknowledge the fact of indeterminacy, someone committed to the ideals of objective thought or to hew closer to Wittgenstein’s concerns, a certain picture of logical structure, could nonetheless be unfazed by them. That is, it remains open to claim that while we find such indeterminacies at work in everyday experience and language, and while we might grudgingly admit that we get along all right with such ‘blurry’ concepts and the like, nonetheless such muddling through falls short of more exacting standards of determinacy, clarity, and precision.8 In Wittgenstein’s case, even if we allow that everyday concepts are not utterly meaningless, it may still be contended that they are imperfect, and so could be replaced by concepts that, variously, avoided or eliminated miscommunication, better captured the fine structure of reality, and met these two desiderata by hewing to an ideal logical structure.9 For Merleau-Ponty, indeterminacy is primarily a perceptual, rather than linguistic, phenomenon, but he likewise sees his appeal to the fact of indeterminacy as liable to be met with the charge that this fact only shows the failings of perception in relation to the project of coming to know an objective, fully determinate world. As Merleau-Ponty notes: In the world taken in itself, everything is determinate. There are of course confused spectacles, such as a landscape in the fog, but even so, one still admits that no real landscape is in itself confused—it is only confused for us. Psychologists will contend that the object is never ambiguous, that it only becomes so through inattention. (PhP 6–7) Whether construed linguistically or perceptually, indeterminacy appears to be a decidedly negative phenomenon, to be overcome or eliminated. 10 That Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty is asking us to accept such indeterminacies— to live with our blurry-edged concepts or ambiguous experience—is asking us to settle for something less than ideal, and that is at best existentially poignant and at worst intellectually deplorable.
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 121 If we consider further Wittgenstein’s example of the curiously disappearing and reappearing chair, we may begin to discern a deeper point concerning indeterminacy beyond noting the fact of it in many, if not all, our ordinary uses of concepts. The first, though perhaps not the best, way to put this is to suggest that indeterminacy is here to stay, in the sense that once we think about what it would take to eliminate it, we see that it could not be done. This becomes evident as we start to reflect on the phrase at the close of the last sentence of § 80, where Wittgenstein asks after our possession of rules for ‘every possible application’. Devising a set of rules to cover every possible application of a concept—past, present, and future—sounds initially like a Herculean task of the first order. Just how many possible applications are there and how does one know when ‘all’ of them have indeed been covered? But it is not just the enormity of the task that is at issue here; it is not just a matter of being a task that may be daunting, practically unfeasible, or even impossible. At issue is the clarity of the desideratum: what would it even mean to have considered ‘every possible application’? Referring back in § 84 to the § 68 discussion of the idea of the application of a word not being ‘everywhere bounded by rules’, Wittgenstein goes beyond the initial descriptively oriented claim to question the contrast that such a description suggests: what exactly is the alternative to not being everywhere bounded by rules? Wittgenstein writes: Speaking of the application of a word, I said that it is not everywhere bounded by rules. But what does a game look like that is everywhere bounded by rules? whose rules never let a doubt creep in, but stop up all the gaps where it might?—Can’t we imagine a rule regulating the application of a rule; and a doubt which it removes—and so on? (PI I § 84) Wittgenstein’s ‘and so on’ here suggests a regress, which in turn suggests that the problem with a complete list of rules—of complete determinacy—is not one of impracticality or being more than we need to carry on with things. A complete list of rules is not an ideal to which we might aspire and perhaps poignantly fail to obtain; rather, as Wittgenstein suggests in the following passage from Zettel , the very idea of such an ideal is what deserves scrutiny: How should we have to imagine a complete list of rules for the employment of a word?—What do we mean by a complete list of rules for the employment of a piece in chess? Couldn’t we always construct doubtful cases, in which the normal list of rules does not decide? Think e.g. of such a question as: how to determine who moved last, if a doubt is raised about the reliability of the players’ memories? The regulation of traffic in the streets permits and forbids certain actions on the part of drivers and pedestrians; but it does not attempt to guide the totality of their movements by prescription. And it would be
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Here Wittgenstein challenges the very idea of ‘a complete list of rules,’ noting the possibility of endlessly constructing ‘doubtful cases’ that would require yet further rules to exclude or decide. Such concocted cases—like the curious chair of Investigations § 80—are normally not at issue in our traffic with concepts like chair and neither can be nor need be addressed beforehand. The possibility of imagining a doubt is not the same thing as being in doubt, so when someone suggests that ‘secure understanding is possible only if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts’, the only reasonable response is the one Wittgenstein offers: ‘The signpost is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose’ (PI I § 87). In the example of traffic regulations in the Zettel passage cited above, Wittgenstein notes that such regulations do ‘not attempt to guide the totality of their movements by prescription’. One way of probing the idea of complete determinacy would be to reflect on just such an attempt at guidance, wherein there is no movement on the part of a person that is not prescribed or regulated. Lacking in this person would be any kind of movement that was, variously, erratic, eccentric, spontaneous, improvisational, or superfluous, or at least where there is movement along these lines, it is to be judged as falling short of what the rules prescribed. Everything about this person’s actions would be, or aspire to be, determinate because everything about them would be determined by rules. There are, I think, very particular and special situations where we can understand striving, at least, for this kind of total prescriptive governance—meticulously choreographed dances, marching band formations, and other complex, highly stylized physical routines— but two issues immediately arise: first, even restricting our attention to these special circumstances, it is not clear if we can think of the prescriptions at work as really guiding the totality of the participants’ bodily movements. If the dance is successful, then the significant actions of the dancers will hew to the instructions of the choreographer, but there will be many less obviously noticeable movements and actions that the instructions do not cover: very slight adjustments for maintaining balance, for example, or movements of the eyes to anticipate the desired landing spot for a leap, and so on. While these various movements may be in the service of the dancer’s efforts to carry out the choreographer’s plans, it is not clear that there could be a complete set of instructions that covered every possible movement on the dancer’s part, as such a set would again have to avert every possible misunderstanding that could arise as the dancer tried to enact the dance.
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 123 That there are movements on the part of the participants that cannot be readily understood as being prescribed brings us to the second issue, which concerns generalizing beyond these very special circumstances: in nonchoreographed circumstances (i.e., most of the time), our movements and actions have considerable leeway or slack. As I sit at my desk, I shift and fidget, cross and uncross my legs, lean in and back, and so on, none of which either accords or fails to accord with any kind of rule; as my attention wanders from the paper I’m trying to write, I shift my gaze about the desk in the manner previously described, and in doing so, I take in visually the variety of artefacts (the stapler, various old cameras, photographs of my children, my coffee cup, etc.) that clutter my desk. The myriad slight adjustments I make are essential to my visual field resolving into foreground and background, and my field’s so resolving is what gives me a grip on a world of objects at all. In Husserl (1989), Husserl had emphasized the importance of what he calls ‘functions of spontaneity’, such that any given perception may ‘disperse into a ‘possible’ series of perceptions’, to the constitution of spatiality and of a space populated by materially real things (Husserl 1989: § 18). To be engaged perceptually and actively with a world of objects is to be confronted with a realm I can freely explore in an open-ended way. If my movements were severely limited or rigidly prescribed, my experience and conception of the world would be correspondingly impoverished to a considerable degree. Building on Husserl’s insights, Merleau-Ponty contends that ‘freedom makes use of the gaze and its spontaneous evaluations,’ and that ‘without these spontaneous evaluations, we would not have a world, that is, a collection of things that emerges from the formless mass by offering themselves to our body as things “to be touched”, “to be taken”, or “to be climbed” ’ (PhP 465). Merleau-Ponty contrasts the notion of a universe, which he characterizes as a ‘completed and explicit totality,’ with the world —what we have—which is ‘an open and indefinite multiplicity’ ( PhP 73). While we may be able to conceive in some attenuated way of such a universe, it is not something we can understand ourselves as inhabiting , as engaging with actively and taking a view upon from a particular location and perspective: If the synthesis could be actual, if my experience formed a closed system, if the thing and the world could be defined once and for all, if spatio-temporal horizons could (even ideally) be made explicit and the world could be conceived from nowhere, then nothing would exist. I would survey the world from above, and far from all places and times suddenly becoming real, they would in fact cease to be real because I would not inhabit any of them and I would be nowhere engaged. If I am always and everywhere, then I am never and nowhere. (PhP 347) What I take Merleau-Ponty to mean here is that the idea of a closed and ‘defined once and for all’ system cancels the idea of a point of view.
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As attention to the fact of indeterminacy revealed, a point of view or a perspective involves both determinate and indeterminate dimensions, a foreground and a background replete with hidden or partially occluded elements and aspects. Nothing would exist in the sense that nothing would be there for me, since I could not distinguish in any way between what is here rather than there, in view rather than somewhere else. Such concepts and contrasts presuppose my bodily presence in the world, which anchors and informs my point of view on it. Hovering above the world is not a way of being in the world.11
4. The Vitality of Indeterminacy: The ‘Whole Hurly-Burly’ According to Wittgenstein, ‘game’ is a concept where there is no one feature (or set of features) common to all games such that they are games. Wittgenstein further notes that any account I might give of my grasp of the concept and any attempt I might make to instruct someone else so as to impart that understanding would rely primarily on describing various exemplary games, while noting that these and similar things are games (see PI I § 69). More expansively, Wittgenstein says that explaining to someone what a game is (or what ‘game’ means) would consist in ‘my describing examples of various kinds of games, showing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these, saying that I would hardly call this or that a game, and so on’ (PI I § 75). Despite the reliance on a small handful of examples and despite the rather vague gesture toward ‘ similar things,’ the remarkable thing (or at least Wittgenstein wants us to see it as remarkable) is the general ease with which the concept of game is circulated and imparted. As with Wittgenstein’s amiable mathematicians at PI I § 240, disputes rarely break out over whether some activity or other is a game; children learning English are generally able to cotton on to the concept and use it relatively fluently quite early on. If we linger on this perfectly ordinary and yet remarkable fact, our attention may be drawn to the dependency of the ease and success of maintaining and passing on our life with ‘game’ on a kind of shared orientation or sensibility, what Wittgenstein refers to shortly after appealing to the largely peaceful scene in mathematics as ‘agreement in judgments’ (PI I § 242). Immediately prior to registering this ‘queer’ formulation, he refers equally to agreement in ‘form of life.’ The forms of agreement Wittgenstein refers to in these passages should not be understood in terms of pacts or conventions; the agreement upon which our life with the concept ‘game’ depends is not a matter of various things we have collectively decided amongst ourselves. Talk of agreement (the German here is Übereinstimmung , which may also be translated as, among other things, conformity, harmony, unison, and even synchronization) registers the ways in which we are alike in numerous and various ways and to various degrees: eating, sleeping, walking, talking, laughing, smiling, crying, gesturing, playing, and so on.12 We are not necessarily like ‘two peas
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 125 in a pod’, but our growing up into these and far more complex activities generally make for a small and mostly manageable range of variations on common themes. I like broccoli, you do not; I find these sorts of jokes funny, you do not, but we still have in common the idea of having a favourite food or finding something funny to hold us together to a far greater degree than to a creature for whom having favourites of anything or reacting with amusement was unfathomable. Similarly, we do not all play or enjoy the same games, but we can generally recognize what others play or enjoy as games; they strike us as sufficiently similar, even if we cannot always say how. Our being so struck bespeaks the kind of common orientation Wittgenstein has in mind here that runs as deep as our most basic capacities for pleasure and pain, amusement and sorrow, entertainment and adventure. Our being able to talk of games with one another and pass on the concept to new generations enlists these myriad capacities. Were they to go missing, our life with the concept ‘game’ would either change considerably or fade away altogether.13 In one of his later manuscripts, Wittgenstein writes: We judge an action according to its background within human life, and this background is not monochrome, but we might picture it as a very complicated filigree pattern, which, to be sure, we can’t copy, but which we can recognize from the general impression it makes. (RPP II § 624) I read the appeal to a background here as along the same lines as his talk of ‘agreement in judgments’ and ‘form of life’ in the Investigations. What Wittgenstein notes here of an action applies equally to games: we judge something to be a game, not according to a fixed list of features, but ‘according to its background within human life’, as something that it makes sense for someone or some of us to play, where the range of what counts as playing is equally dependent on this background. Note that Wittgenstein describes this background in terms of a ‘complicated filigree pattern’ that we cannot copy, which registers a new level or layer of indeterminacy. To be sure, the background in question makes a ‘general impression’, but it eludes any kind of precise demarcation or summary. In the immediately subsequent remarks in this manuscript, Wittgenstein further elaborates on this kind of indeterminacy: The background is the bustle of life. And our concept points to something within this bustle. (RPP II § 625) The notion of a ‘bustle’ (the German here is Getriebe) is itself a deliberately vague notion (at RPP II § 622 immediately preceding this stretch of remarks, Wittgenstein discusses the paradigmatic vague 14 concept, ‘heap’);
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there is no saying just how much activity or what variety constitutes a bustle. Instead, it is a matter of the impression it makes. As Wittgenstein immediately notes: And it is the very concept ‘bustle’ that brings about this indefiniteness. For a bustle comes about only through constant repetition. And there is no definite starting point for ‘constant repetition’. (RPP II § 626) ‘Bustle’ is only one of several terms that Wittgenstein uses in remarks from this late period in his writings. Immediately after invoking the notion of a bustle, he adds another: How could human behavior be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly [Gewimmel], is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions. (RPP II § 629; Z § 567) This last remark also appears in Zettel , where it is followed by the following pair of remarks: Seeing life as a weave, this pattern (pretence, say) is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. That is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion. (Z § 568) And one pattern in the weave is interwoven with many others. (Z §569) The idea of a pattern appears in the opening remarks of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, most notably where Wittgenstein says that ‘ “grief” describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the tapestry of life’ (PI II § i). What all of these notions—weave, pattern, bustle, hurlyburly—appear to be driving at is not just the way particular actions (as well as uses of a word, applications of a concept, and so on) are embedded in broader surroundings, but the way those surroundings form a kind of indefinite backdrop. As indefinite, there is room for variation, multiplicity, leeway for innumerable differences. Although Wittgenstein insists on a kind of fundamental agreement underwriting our uses of concepts and our managing to communicate with one another via such concepts, this should not be understood as any kind of lockstep uniformity; indeed, Wittgenstein suggests that were there such homogeneity, many of our familiar concepts would lose their grip.
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 127 This last point deserves further development, as it points in the direction of the most significant way in which indeterminacy is for Wittgenstein a ‘positive phenomenon.’ Moreover, attention to his point redoubles the ideas canvassed in the previous section, namely, that indeterminacy is not just a descriptive feature of the ways we make sense of the world and one another but in some way essential to the activity of making sense. In another later manuscript, Wittgenstein writes: ‘If a pattern of life is the basis for the use of a word then the word must contain some amount of indefiniteness. The pattern of life, after all, is not one of exact regularity’ ( LW I § 211). Although much of Wittgenstein’s late discussions involving indeterminacy are devoted to questions of expression, emotion, and feeling, there would appear to be a more general moral here, for is there any word that we speak that does not have as its basis a ‘pattern of life’? The whole motivation for Wittgenstein’s introduction of the notion of a language-game at the outset of the Philosophical Investigations—viz. its third intended sense as ‘the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven’ ( PI I §7—my emphasis)—is to suggest a negative answer to this last question. Later in the same manuscript, Wittgenstein refers back to the opening of the Investigations and the Builders of §2 in order to emphasize this point: ‘If the language-game, the activity, for instance, building a house (as in No 2), fixes the use of a word, then the concept of use is flexible, and varies along with the concept of activity. But that is in the essence of language’ (LW I § 340). This is an especially interesting remark when we recall that the theme of indeterminacy becomes central in the Investigations via Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance, which itself is introduced as a way of refusing to say what is essential to language. Now it would appear that an essential feature of language is precisely to lack any kind of fixed essence. Consider a remark from within the stretch recently considered but which I initially passed over, immediately after adducing the notion of a bustle, Wittgenstein remarks: Variability itself is a characteristic of behaviour without which behaviour would be to us as something completely different. (The facial features characteristic of grief, for instance, are not more meaningful than their mobility.) (RPP II §627) The pairing here of meaning and mobility underscores the significance of the latter to the former: immobilizing or otherwise limiting the variability of behaviour and expression robs them of their expressiveness, thereby undercutting their being the kinds of meaningful gestures and displays of feeling that they are. It is hard to know precisely how to secure this point. After all, counterexamples of various kinds appear to be available: we are able to ‘read’ the expressions of very schematic, simplified figures, in cartoons, for example; less cartoonishly, people do suffer debilitating conditions, paralysis of the facial muscles, for example, yet we still count them as possessed of
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feeling. I do not think these count as genuine counterexamples: cartoonish expressions are themselves a kind of variation, one which our understanding of expressions allows, but their appearing that way in cartoons is part of what secures their intelligibility. Transferred to real people, such expressions take on a more terrifying aspect. The paralysis case is also disturbing, which attests to Wittgenstein’s point: a person suffering from such a condition thereby becomes more enigmatic, but again the leeway in our concepts allows for continuation of their ‘patterns’ in such cases as well: the muscles around the mouth may be frozen, say, but the widening of the eyes, the shake of the head, a clenched fist may be sufficient for that person to express herself. Wittgenstein notes that ‘given much less variety, a sharply bounded conceptual structure would have to seem natural,’ but then goes on to ask: ‘But why does it seem so difficult to imagine the simplified case?’ by which I take him to mean: imagining such cases as the rule, rather than as variously tragic or cartoonish variations on our own familiarly unbounded structure. The final paragraph of the same remark offers an attempt: Is it as if one were trying to imagine a facial expression not susceptible of gradual and subtle alterations; but which had, say, just five positions; when it changed it would snap straight from one to another. Would this fixed smile really be a smile? And why not?—I might not be able to react as I do to a smile. Maybe it would not make me smile myself. (RPP II § 614) A face that snapped from one expression to another, as though with the turning of a click-wheel, would admit of considerably more determinacy than any of our own. There would be no question as to what ‘position’ such a person’s face was presently in—Position 1, say, rather than 3—but that kind of determinacy would not lend to those expressions anything more by way of intelligibility. Indeed, quite the opposite: the limited range of expressions and the rigid transitions among them make it hard to see them as expressions at all. There would instead be something mechanistic about such a physiognomy, which is part of why Wittgenstein says it would likely ‘not make me smile myself.’ Such a face would not invite a reciprocal response, as a smiling or otherwise friendly mien typically does. Wittgenstein continues by noting that ‘a facial expression that was completely fixed couldn’t be a friendly one. Variability and irregularity are essential to a friendly expression. Irregularity is part of its physiognomy’ ( RPP II § 615). Wittgenstein’s stress on the significance of variability and irregularity is accompanied in the later manuscripts with an approving use of the notion of the soul , most famously when he says in the philosophy of psychology fragment: ‘My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul,’ which is quickly qualified with, ‘I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (PI II § iv). I read Wittgenstein’s refusal of the category of opinion here to register
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 129 the depth of the attitude in question: an opinion is something that can be weighed and appraised, altered or deleted in response to evidence, and so on, whereas the attitude Wittgenstein reports has a kind of immediacy that is not responsive to evidence. Indeed, it is only in light of such an attitude that certain kinds or categories of evidence become available: that someone displays evidence of melancholy or hurt feelings, shame or regret presupposes, rather than supports, the notion of a soul. Hence Wittgenstein’s blunt rejection of any attempt to reduce the soul to the body: ‘Am I saying something like, “and the soul itself is merely something about the body”? No. (I am not that hard up for categories.)’ ( RPP II § 690). For Wittgenstein, the notion of a soul is bound up with a variety of other notions: expression, thought, and feeling, but also being unpredictable and even unknowable.15 Moreover, Wittgenstein contrasts the notion of a soul—of having a soul— with that of the mechanical—of being a machine: ‘ “A dog is more like a human being than a being endowed with a human form, but which behaved ‘mechanically’.” Behaved according to simple rules?’ ( RPP II § 623) And elsewhere he writes: But the opposite of being full of soul is being mechanical. If you want to act like a robot—how does your behaviour deviate from our ordinary behaviour? By the fact that our ordinary movements cannot even approximately be described by means of geometrical concepts. (RPP I §324)16 Something that is ‘full of soul’ displays a kind of variability, flexibility, and indeterminacy radically unlike the workings of a machine, whose movements may be more precise but also more rigidly parameterized. 17 Elsewhere, Wittgenstein explicitly connects this idea of being full of soul with the notions of unforseeability and indeterminacy: ‘But with a human being, the assumption is that it is impossible to gain an insight into the mechanism. Thus indeterminacy is postulated’ ( RPP II §666). No such ‘assumption’ is involved in the idea of a machine or a mechanism: ‘Looking at it one might think: if I knew what it looked like inside, what was going on right now, I would know what to expect’ (RPP II §665). While the laws of its operation may be very complicated, such that predicting its movements might elude the casual observer, there is certainly no ‘postulated’ indeterminacy at work. But this lack of indeterminacy is precisely what underwrites the opposition between being mechanical and being full of soul: mechanized, rigid motions are marked by an absence of the kind of expressiveness and meaning conveyed in the fluid and variable actions of living beings. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein asks, almost despairingly, ‘How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing ?’ What dispels the sense of despair is the image of an organic, animalistic kind of movement, albeit of a very primitive kind: ‘And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once
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these difficulties vanish, and pain seems to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it’ (PI I §284). Wriggling is ‘full of soul’ in the sense that it expresses and conveys the organism’s suffering , its plight as something trapped, perhaps even doomed. And wriggling is not a sharply bounded kind of movement: if the fly only flipped one way and another in a perfectly rigid way, without any variation, its movements would likely remain ‘too smooth’ for the ascription of any kind of pain. 18 Wittgenstein’s wriggling fly finds a counterpart in Merleau-Ponty’s mention of a drowning one, purportedly contemplated by Spinoza: Spinoza would not have spent so much time considering a drowning fly if this behavior had not offered to the eye something other than a fragment of extension; the theory of animal machines is a ‘resistance’ to the phenomenon of behavior. (SB 127) Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of the notion of resistance in its psychoanalytic sense suggests that he regards considering the body—even the body of an animal—in strictly mechanical terms as indicative of a latent hostility toward the unruly but expressive antics of the living organism. Approached without resistance, such antics bespeak not the workings of a machine but of a soul. As with Wittgenstein, for Merleau-Ponty the expressiveness of the face registers this idea most emphatically: A face is a center of human expression, the transparent envelope of the attitudes and desires of others, the place of manifestation, the barely material support for a multitude of intentions. This is why it seems impossible for us to treat a face or a body, even a dead body, like a thing. They are sacred entities, not the ‘givens of sight.’ (SB 167) Late in Part One of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes ‘man’ as having ‘a genius for ambiguity’ ( PhP 195). The ‘genius’ at issue is a kind of resistance to the possibility of sharply bounded categories— most notably, the biological versus cultural, but also the physiological and the mental—such that everything we do and say can be traced to both kinds of categories but without any neat bifurcation of different aspects of what we say and do into one category or the other. There is instead a kind of ‘escape’ across the boundaries. Merleau-Ponty goes so far as to say that this ‘genius for ambiguity might serve to define man.’ His appeal to ambiguity here, to the way human activity cannot be neatly decomposed into a number of mutually exclusive categories, recalls Wittgenstein’s appeal to the ‘hurly-burly’ that forms the backdrop of human life, a ‘filigree pattern’ that makes an impression but that we cannot copy. ‘Irregularity is part of the physiognomy’ of human life, and both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 131 emphasize that this kind of indeterminacy is not a defect in our knowledge or understanding of ourselves. We cannot copy the pattern because the pattern is not something settled or fixed, but shifting and evolving over time. In the chapter preceding the one where he appeals to our ‘genius for ambiguity,’ at the culmination of his discussion of sexuality, Merleau-Ponty declares that in human existence: There is a principle of indetermination, and this indetermination does not merely exist for us, it does not result from some imperfection in our knowledge, and we must not hold that a God might sound out our hearts and minds and determine what comes from nature and what comes from freedom. (PhP 172–3) He goes on to say that: Existence is indeterminate in itself because of its fundamental structure: insofar as existence is the very operation by which something that had no sense takes on sense, by which something that only had a sexual sense adopts a more general signification, by which chance is transformed into reason, or in other words insofar as existence is the taking up of a de facto situation. (PhP 173) The ‘meaningless takes on meaning’ in virtue of this ‘principle of indeterminacy.’ The indeterminate, the unbounded: such notions are not for Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein obstacles or impediments to meaning but constitutive of it. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Wittgenstein, ‘ambiguity is not an imperfection of consciousness or existence, it is their very definition’ (PhP 347). If this is correct, then any attempt to overcome or eliminate such ambiguity and irregularity is bound eventually to come to grief. But this does not render such attempts impossible. Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein both see their thinking as up against dominant views wherein such indeterminacy both can and should be eliminated. Nor does it mean that every attempt to eliminate any bit of ambiguity is bound to have untoward effects. We ‘can draw a boundary—for a special purpose,’ and it is an open question whether doing so counts as an improvement. Elsewhere Wittgenstein considers the possibility of sharpening up our language-games, replacing them with ones that are more exact. Not surprisingly, his response toward the consequences of such an endeavor itself registers an attitude of indeterminacy: And now the question remains whether we would give up our languagegame which rests on ‘imponderable evidence’ and frequently leads to uncertainty, if it were possible to exchange it for a more exact one which by and large would have similar consequences. For instance, we
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David R. Cerbone could work with a mechanical ‘lie detector’ and redefine a lie as that which causes a deflection on the lie detector. So the question is: Would we change our way of living if this or that were provided for us?—And how could I answer that? (LW II 95)
5. Quinean Coda: Intentionality and the ‘Dramatic Idiom’ Toward the end of Chapter 2 of Word and Object (Quine 1960), Quine conjectures in a footnote that ‘perhaps the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation will have little air of paradox for readers familiar with Wittgenstein’s remarks on meaning’ (Quine 1960: 77). The question of the relation between Quine and Wittgenstein is a difficult one. Burton Dreben has referred to them as the ‘odd couple’ (Quine and Merleau-Ponty would no doubt be an odder pairing still), while Peter Hacker has invoked a notion of ‘proximity at great distance,’ which bespeaks a lingering ‘air of paradox’ despite Quine’s suggestion to the contrary. 19 Without trying to settle entirely the issue of their interrelation, we might say something about this. There would be little in the way of paradox or surprise for either Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty if confronted with Quine’s indeterminacy thesis, at least in this one respect: neither of them would balk especially at the contention that rival manuals of translations ‘are compatible with all the same distributions of states and relations over elementary particles’ (Quine 1981: 23). That questions of meaning would not be settled by determinations regarding the particles revealed and explored by physics is hardly to be wondered at, since that is entirely the wrong place to look, and so Merleau-Ponty for one puts little stock in an attempt to ‘construct the picture of this world, life, perception, or mind’ starting from the ‘physicist’s atoms’ ( PhP 24). Any such reconstructive projects are doomed to failure, as the phenomenon of meaning or significance has already been lost from view. Whence then the distance despite the great proximity? The difference lies in the lessons to be gleaned from the failure of the notion of meaning to be amenable to our more scientific aspirations. For Quine, the difference between what is recognized from the standpoint of ‘the strictest scientific spirit’ and what is allowed for when using the intentional idiom is the difference ‘between literal theory and dramatic portrayal’ (Quine 1960: 219). In so relegating the intentional idiom, Quine thereby registers a kind of agreement with Brentano concerning the relation of the intentional to the non-intentional: just as the dramatic cannot be rendered without loss in literal terms, so too the intentional cannot be reduced to the non-intentional. Again, this is in keeping with Quine’s central indeterminacy thesis: since conflicting manuals of translation are ‘physically equivalent’ (Quine 1981: 23), there is no hope of reducing them to, or identifying them in terms of,
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 133 properly scientific (i.e., physical) phy sical) theories. As Quine notes, ‘Brentano’s thesis of the irreducibility of intentional idioms is of a piece with the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation’ (Quine 1960: 221). Quine’s agreement with Brentano only goes so far, however, since Quine draws an altogether different conclusion from the basic point about irreducibility: One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano’s, is the second. (Quine 1960: 221) Quine means baselessness quite literally here, since there is nothing in physics to settle the rivalry between competing manuals of translation: such rivalries outstrip, and so cannot be based upon, matters of physical fact. However, this passage about the lessons of Brentano’s thesis contains something of a fudge on Quine’s part, since each of the alternatives consists of a conjunction of two claims and Quine really only rejects one of the two conjuncts he attributes to Brentano. While Quine certainly does not share Brentano’s opinion on ‘the importance of an autonomous science of intention,’ what is less clear is whether he regards intentional idioms to be dispensable. That is, while he clearly sees no hope of bringing the intentional into line with the strict standards of scientific theorizing, at the same time, he concedes the importance of such idioms, and in various contexts. While Quine maintains that ‘intentional idioms’ have no role to play when ‘limning the true and ultimate structure of reality’ and that ‘all traits of reality worthy of the name can be set down’ in the austere idiom of the natural sciences, he nonetheless does not ‘forswear daily use of intentional idioms, or maintain that they are practically dispensable’ (Quine 1960: 221).20 Quine’s perhaps grudging acknowledgement of the importance of the ‘intentional idioms’ renders questionable his condemnation of ‘a science of intention’ as empty. empty. While perhaps such an enterprise could not and should not aspire to the austerity of the natural sciences, something so fundamental and indispensable to our lives merits investigation. Ought we not to be interested in something more than what is available from the perspective of the natural sciences, if, as Quine himself acknowledges, they ‘conceal from us the “cultural world” or the “human world” in which almost our entire life happens’ (PhP 25)? Although Quine emphatically rejects the notion of an autonomous ‘science of the mental,’ the fact that the ‘austere idiom’ of the natural sciences is insufficient to capture life’s ‘drama’—what MerleauPonty calls ‘the homeland of of our thoughts’ (PhP 26)—speaks compellingly in favour of just such an enterprise.
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Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Existential Phenomenology in Berkeley, California, in March 2013. I would like to thank the participants in that conference—especially conference—especially Taylor Carman, Hans Sluga, and Mark Wrathall—for their comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank Randall Havas, Edward Minar, and especially Komarine Romdenh-Romluc Romdenh-Romluc for their comments and discussion of earlier drafts of this paper. 2 I should note at the outset that throughout the discussion various senses of indeterminacy will be in play. For Quine, indeterminacy means the absence of any fact of the matter with respect to a rivalry between two (or more) alternatives. I think something like this notion of indeterminacy carries over to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, but often the term suggests something more along the lines of being indefinite, vague, unbounded, open-ended, or unresolvable. I will not endeavor in this discussion to render the notion of indeterminacy more determinate. 3 This is not true of philosophy alone. For many at the time—most notably Einstein—the postulation of quantum indeterminacies via Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was hardly a cause for celebration. 4 In thinking about the place of indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty, I have profited greatly from Kelly (2005), as well as Siewert (2005). Both Kelly and Siewert offer careful analyses and interpretations of the meaning and significance of indeterminacy in perceptual experience. As Siewert notes, his discussion avoids ascending prematurely to the ‘grander themes’ of Merleau-Ponty’s existential philosophy, philosophy, favoring instead the ‘humble sensory case’ that must first be properly understood. At the risk of undue haste, I do try below to consider some of those broader themes. I have also profited from Sapontzis (1978). 5 The theme of indeterminacy in Wittgenstein’s philosophy has not, to my mind, been sufficiently explored. The most thorough treatment thus far is Meyer (1998). I have profited greatly from Meyer’s Meyer’s discussion, although I don’t know if I agree with him on all points of interpretation. Meyer conceives of indeterminacy in terms of judgments and their determination (or not) by rules. Indeterminate judgments form a special class or kind, in contrast to garden variety determinate judgments. While this may well be one kind of indeterminacy at issue in Wittgenstein, I do not think it is the only one. As I try to show below, there is a kind of indeterminacy in language (or concepts) that does not form a special sub-category. sub-category. See also Hertzberg (1983) and ter Hark (2004), which rightly notes how the notion of indeterminacy gains prominence in Wittgenstein’s last writings on the philosophy of psychology. Recent work by Theodore Schatzki has also foregrounded the notion of indeterminacy in Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and in doing so, emphasizes the affinities between Wittgenstein and another central figure in 20th-century phenomenology, Martin Heidegger. See, for example, Schatzki (2013). There is, finally, finally, one precedent for bringing Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein together on this topic: Marsh (1975). Although I agree with Marsh in terms of the general congruence of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on this score, his discussion discuss ion does not, in my view, view, properly emphasize emphasiz e the positive dimensions of indeterminacy in both cases: its ‘triumph’ is mainly one of debunking traditional Cartesian pictures of mind and world. Indeed, Marsh reads Wittgenstein as primarily, and even only, a negative philosopher concerned only to establish a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism, in contrast to a kind of enlightened essentialism in Merleau-Ponty. My discussion should make clear my disagreement with Marsh on this front. 6 Merleau-Ponty is here referring to experience. In the older Smith translation, experience is described as ‘what stares us in the face’.
Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein 135 7 The last time I taught the Investigations, the class was pretty evenly divided over whether what Wittgenstein describes in PI I I § 80 ought to be called a chair, which seemed to demonstrate his point, especially as there was little in the way of resources to settle such a dispute. 8 For a spirited defense of Frege’s demand for sharp concepts, see Weiner (1997). See also Diamond (1995). 9 There are contexts where claims of this sort are perfectly in order, order, where greater precision in categorization or discrimination is necessary for various purposes. Wittgenstein addresses this point at PI I I § 88 of the Investigations , noting that this kind of goal-dependent notion of determinacy or exactitude does not license its generalization beyond any and all particular contexts: ‘No single ideal of exactness has been envisaged; we do not know what we are to make of this idea.’ 10 There is, I believe, a parallel between this kind of response to the fact of indeterminacy and the perceived inadequacy of ‘pragmatic’ responses to skepticism to the effect that our everyday epistemic standards are good enough for the kinds of knowledge claims we make and exchange outside of any specialized, distinctively philosophical context. That both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein address the canvassed response to indeterminacy is suggestive for how they might address both skepticism and the kind of impatience that often greets pragmatic responses to it. I cannot, however, however, follow up these parallels here. 11 Even the notion of hovering suggests suggests some particular location, and so would still involve the notion of perspective, along with various forms of indeterminacy and incompleteness. 12 12 See PI I I § 25. 13 I 13 I am aware in my putting things this way of my tremendous debt to the work of Stanley Cavell. I should note especially here Cavell (1976) and its appeal to the ‘whirl of organism’ (formulated without, to my knowledge, acquaintance with the late manuscripts on the philosophy of psychology that I discuss below) within which our concepts have their life. I am particularly indebted as well to Cavell’s remarks on learning to speak as requiring the projection of words into new contexts as involving what Cavell refers to as an ‘inner constancy’ and ‘outer variance.’ See Cavell (1982), Part Two, Chapter VII: ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language.’ 14 Elsewhere, 14 Elsewhere, Wittgenstein writes: ‘The greatest difficulty in these investigations is to find a way of representing vagueness’ (LW I I § 347). 15 ‘I think unforeseeability unforeseeability must must be an essential property of the mental. Just like the endless multiplicity of expression’ ( LW II II 65). 16 See 16 See also LW II II 66: ‘One could also put it this way: How would a human body have to act so that one would not be inclined to speak of inner and outer human states? Again and again, I think: “like a machine”’. 17 This 17 This paragraph is taken almost verbatim from Cerbone (2013). In that discussion, I am considering Wittgenstein’s (and Heidegger’s) relation to modernist architecture, more specifically, to Le Corbusier’s reconception of the house as ‘a machine for living in.’ 18 Again 18 Again using the notion of a pattern and the imagery of weaving , Wittgenstein in one later manuscript writes: ‘ “Grief” describes a pattern which recurs in the weave of our life. Now a process is also part of this pattern. If a man’s bodily expressions of sorrow and joy alternated, say with the ticking of a metronome, then this would not result in the pattern of sorrow or joy. (This does not mean that joy or grief are kinds of behaviour.)’ (LW I I § 406). 19 See Dreben (1996) (1996) and Hacker (1996). (1996). 20 20 I discuss these tensions in Quine’s attitude towards the ‘intentional idiom’ at greater length in Cerbone (2012), parts of which I have made use of in this discussion.
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References Cavell, S. 1976. The availability of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In his Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 44–72. Cavell, S. 1982. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cerbone, D. 2012. Lost belongings: Heidegger, naturalism, and natural science. In T. Glazebrook (ed.), Heidegger on Science. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 131–153. Cerbone, D. 2013. Dwelling on rough ground: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, architecture. In D. Egan, S. Reynolds, and A. Wendland (eds.), Wittgenstein and Heidegger. London: Routledge, pp. 245–260. Diamond, C. 1995. Frege against fuzz. In her The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 145–178. Dreben, B. 1996. Quine and Wittgenstein: The odd couple. In R. Arrington and H-J. Glock (eds.), Wittgenstein and Quine. London: Routledge, pp. 39–61. Hacker, P.M.S. 1996. Wittgenstein and Quine: Proximity at great distance. In R. Arrington and H-J. Glock (eds.), Wittgenstein and Quine. London: Routledge, pp. 1–38. Hertzberg, L. 1983. The Indeterminacy of the mental. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 57: 91–109. Husserl, E. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book. Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kelly, S. D. 2005. Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty. In T. Carman and M. Hansen (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–110. Marsh, J. L. 1975. The triumph of ambiguity: Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. Philosophy Today 19 (3): 243–255. Meyer, T. A. 1998. Rule: A Study in Indeterminacy. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania. Quine, W.V.O. 1960. Word and Object . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1981. Things and their place in theories. In his Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–23. Sapontzis, S. F. 1978. A note on Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ambiguity’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38 (4): 538–543. Schatzki, T. R. 2013. Human activity as an indeterminate social event. In D. Egan, S. Reynolds, and A. Wendland (eds.), Wittgenstein and Heidegger. London: Routledge, pp. 179–194. Siewert, C. 2005. Attention and sensorimotor intentionality. In D. Smith and A. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 270–294. ter Hark, M. 2004. ‘Patterns of life’: a third Wittgensteinian concept. In D. MoyalSharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works. Hampshire: Ashgate, pp. 125–144. Weiner, J. 1997. Has Frege a philosophy of language? In W. W. Tait (ed.), Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell Wittgenstein. Chicago: Open Court, pp. 249–273.
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Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty Thomas Baldwin
Anyone familiar with Wittgenstein’s notes On Certainty and MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception will have noticed that there are similarities between Wittgenstein’s account of the certainty of our commonsense picture of the world ( OC §93) and Merleau-Ponty’s description of the ‘faith’ that ‘places us in the world prior to every science’ ( PhP 359). My aim in this paper is to explore these similarities and also some of the differences between their positions. I start by identifying a few points from Wittgenstein’s position, since his notes On Certainty are readily accessible, and then use these points as the basis for an initial comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s position which has to be brought together from passages spread throughout the five hundred pages of Phenomenology of Perception.
1. Introduction—Some Quick Comparisons Wittgenstein begins his notes On Certainty with his critical response to what he takes to have been G. E. Moore’s ‘dogmatic’ response to skepticism: ‘from his utterance “I know . . .” it does not follow that he does know it.1 That he does know takes some shewing’ (OC §§13–4). This response is, however, combined with a positive appropriation of the truisms which Moore set out in his paper ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (Moore 1993: 107–9) as ‘hinge’ propositions which provide a fixed, secure, picture of the world for the networks of ordinary beliefs which pivot around them ( OC §341). As such, these hinge propositions are certainties which are ‘exempt from doubt’ (OC §341). To take his position further Wittgenstein introduces a categorial distinction between knowledge and certainty ( OC §308) which leads him into an inquiry into the significance of claims about knowledge. The main point of these claims, he suggests, is to provide assessments of the reliability of potential informants, so that to claim to know something ‘might be to indicate where I can be relied upon’ ( OC §575). In one of his final notes (OC §622), Wittgenstein then remarks that this way of thinking about knowledge enables one to understand how one might accept Moore’s characteristic claims to knowledge, for example that circumstances are such that he knows ‘this is a hand’, without taking it that Moore’s claim
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is ‘philosophically astonishing’, that is to say, that it provides by itself a decisive counterexample to skeptical objections to the possibility of such knowledge. For accepting Moore’s claim to knowledge is not the same as explaining why Moore can be relied upon in this instance. Wittgenstein holds that such an explanation can be provided once one recognises that the possibility of mistakes and reasonable doubts arises only where certain conditions are satisfied and that under normal circumstances these conditions do not apply to Moore’s claim. So Moore can be relied upon; he does know that this is a hand. But showing this was not just a matter of taking his word for it. I say more below about Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and the positions advanced there. But it is now time to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty remarks that ‘In a phenomenological conception, this dogmatism and this skepticism are simultaneously overcome’ (PhP 418), and a position of this kind, lying between dogmatism and skepticism, is on the face of it similar to that suggested by Wittgenstein. The ‘dogmatism’ Merleau-Ponty has in mind here is a view which he attributes to Spinoza, that under ordinary circumstances the world is just ‘evident’ to us in a way which makes doubt or error unreasonable, which is similar to the position attributed by Wittgenstein to Moore. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘skeptic’ by contrast is someone who regards what is evident as merely evident to us, and thus as an appearance which cannot be assumed to be a reliable guide to what is really the case. Merleau-Ponty’s response is that the skeptic here betrays a misunderstanding of experience and reality as terms which are in principle absolutely independent of each other, instead of recognising that they are essentially related, so that, despite the fallibility of experience which the dogmatist overlooks, it is appropriate ‘to define being as what appears to us’ (PhP 419). This comment appears to have an idealist implication which would be alien to Wittgenstein, who treats idealism as a form of skepticism (OC §37), and I shall return in the final part of this paper to the issue this raises. In the present context, however, a different aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s response to skepticism merits attention, namely his insistence that doubt makes sense only where it draws on beliefs that themselves commit the doubter to the world—‘neither error nor doubt ever cut us off from truth, because they are surrounded by an horizon of the world’ ( PhP 419). So, like Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty argues that the position of the radical skeptic is undermined by the fact that the possibility of doubt rests on an antecedent commitment to the existence of the world. For Wittgenstein these commitments are manifested in the role and status of Moore’s truisms as hinge propositions which are exempt from doubt. In his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty begins by affirming in his ‘Preface’ that ‘the certainties of common sense’ are ‘the constant theme of philosophy’ (PhP lxxvii). This sounds Moorean, but Merleau-Ponty qualifies his attachment to these certainties by saying that phenomenology requires one to suspend a commitment to them precisely in order to
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 139 reawaken an understanding of the ways in which as ‘presuppositions of every thought’ they are liable to pass unnoticed (PhP lxxvii). In a rather similar way Wittgenstein remarks in his Philosophical Investigations that one of his aims is to bring to our attention ‘[t]he aspects of things that are most important for us’ which ‘are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’ (PI I §129); and he then adds the parenthetical comment ‘(One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes)’ which might suggest that some way of distancing oneself from these aspects, and thus a kind of ‘epoché’, will then be needed to bring them to one’s attention. But Wittgenstein does not in fact recommend anything that resembles the phenomenological epoché; instead, in the next paragraph, he remarks that the ‘clear and simple language-games’ introduced at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations are intended as ‘ objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities’ ( PI I §130). So, and this is, I think, a significant ‘dissimilarity’ in philosophical method, Wittgenstein takes it that reflection on ‘clear and simple language-games’ should enable us to notice the aspects of things that are normally hidden because they are too familiar, whereas for Merleau-Ponty the phenomenological epoché is intended to achieve much the same result by a kind of detached reflection which ‘steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth’ as it ‘loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear’ (PhP lxxvii).2 Returning now to the issue of certainty, the claim that is characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s position is that ‘There is an absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any particular being’ (PhP 311). He does not, however, make it clear how this absolute certainty of the world in general sits alongside the certainties of common sense. One might just take it that, for Merleau-Ponty, these latter certainties concern ‘particular beings’ and thus lack the ‘absolute’ certainty of the world itself. But it is also possible to propose a Moorean interpretation of them in terms of something like the list of ‘truisms’ which Moore took to comprise the ‘common sense view of the world’ which he claimed to ‘know for certain’ (Moore 1993: 118). For Moore, these truisms characterise fundamental aspects of the world, such as space, time (Moore’s list here includes Wittgenstein’s favourite example: ‘the earth had existed for many years before my body was born’—Moore (1993: 107); cf. (OC §84) ), substance (‘things’), other people, and so on, and these are all surely to be included in the conception of the ‘world in general’ of which Merleau-Ponty declares us to be absolutely certain. So it seems reasonable to take it that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘absolute certainty’ includes ‘the certainties of common sense’, understood along the lines of Moore’s list of truisms; indeed Moore’s list begins with a proposition which is especially appropriate in the context of a comparison with Merleau-Ponty: ‘There exists at present a living human body, which is my body’ (Moore 1993: 107).
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To complete this first, brief comparison between the positions of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, I turn to the question of the relationship between certainty and knowledge. As I have indicated, Wittgenstein places them in different categories: where certainty applies to the propositions which provide the frame of our picture of the world, attributions of knowledge arise within the context of discussions about who can be relied upon as a source of information. Merleau-Ponty also distinguishes certainty from knowledge, but in rather different ways. He takes it that the certainty of the world provides the basis for ‘thetic’ knowledge about it: ‘the certainty of the thing and of the world precedes the thetic knowledge of their properties’ ( PhP 402)— where ‘thetic knowledge’ is explicit knowledge that is typically expressed in language. But he also writes of a ‘primordial knowledge of all things’ that is awakened by ‘the actual contact with the thing’ (PhP 388), that is, the kind of perception which is ‘ originary knowledge’ (PhP 45) in which ‘we merge with this body which knows more than we do about the world’ ( PhP 248). This kind of knowledge cannot be the thetic knowledge of the properties of things that is preceded by the certainty of the world; instead it is an implicit ‘non-thetic’ knowledge of the world provided by perception and implicit in that certainty of the world. So Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relationship between certainty and knowledge is mediated by his distinction between these two kinds of knowledge, between, for example, our ‘objective and detached knowledge of the body’ and ‘this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies’ (PhP 213). There is more to be said about this distinction, and I will come back to it. But on the face of it, this distinction between two kinds of knowledge is rather different from Wittgenstein’s position, so that the agreement between them on the existence of a distinction between certainty and knowledge is combined with disagreement concerning its basis. In order to proceed further, I need to lay out some more features of the positions advanced by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. As before, I start off from Wittgenstein since his discussion is the more approachable although, of course, it also gives rise to difficult questions.
2. Wittgenstein and On Certainty The notes published as On Certainty are among Wittgenstein’s last writings. The first part (OC §§1–65) was written on twenty loose sheets of paper which Wittgenstein left in his room in Elizabeth Anscombe’s house in Oxford where he lived from April 1950 until February 1951. She reports (OC ‘Preface’, vi) that she formed the impression that they were written in Vienna in early 1950, shortly before he came to stay with her. The next part (OC §§66–299) comes from notebooks which Wittgenstein wrote while staying with her.3 In March 1951 Wittgenstein moved back to Cambridge, and while living there he wrote the final part (OC §§300–676) in more notebooks; the last entry is dated 27 April 1951, just two days before his death.
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 141 When reading these notes, therefore, one must realise that they are quite unlike the text of part I of Philosophical Investigations (the text of part II is a different matter) which comprises a series of paragraphs carefully selected from longer manuscripts and meticulously organised for publication by Wittgenstein himself. In the case of On Certainty, the text comprises unrevised notes which were not prepared for publication by Wittgenstein; as published they are ordered only by the date of composition and have been numbered by the editors (G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright), not by Wittgenstein himself. The editors do, however, add that in his notebooks Wittgenstein himself had marked off these notes as a topic separate from his notes on the other topics discussed there (colour, ‘the inner’, and culture). So they felt themselves to be justified in publishing these notes by themselves as a single, sustained treatment of one topic, to which they gave the title Über Gewissheit (On Certainty). Concerning this choice of title, it is worth adding that alongside the familiar German words for ‘certain’ and ‘certainty’, ‘gewiss’ and ‘Gewissheit ’, Wittgenstein often uses the words ‘ sicher’ and ‘Sicherheit ’, which in many contexts one would translate as ‘secure’ and ‘security’ but which here have an epistemic application so that the translations ‘sure’ and ‘being sure’ are generally more appropriate. However, the difference between these idioms is not indicated in the English translation in which the single pair of English words, ‘certain’ and ‘certainty’, is employed to translate both pairs of German terms, despite the fact that for Wittgenstein these idioms do not appear to be interchangeable. The immediate stimulus for Wittgenstein’s reflections on this topic seems to have been discussions with his friend Norman Malcolm. In the summer of 1949, before his return to Vienna, Wittgenstein spent three months in the United States with Malcolm, and Malcolm reports (Malcolm 1977) that during this visit they discussed his recently published paper ‘Defending Common Sense’ (Malcolm 1949) in which he criticised Moore’s defence of common sense. Malcolm does not suggest that Wittgenstein wrote anything on this topic while he was in the United States; but it seems likely that he had been sufficiently stimulated by their discussions to write up his thoughts on the topic while he was in Vienna. So although there are no references to Malcolm’s paper in Wittgenstein’s notes, the notes start with his own critical response to Moore. The very first note ( OC §1) begins with a reference to Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World’ (Moore 1993: 165–6): ‘If you do know that here is one hand , we’ll grant you all the rest. . . .’, and shortly afterwards (OC §6) there is a reference to ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (Moore 1993: 106 ff.) when he writes: ‘Now, can one enumerate what one knows (like Moore)? Straight off like that, I believe not. . . .’ But it should also be acknowledged that some of the themes of On Certainty are anticipated in notes which Wittgenstein wrote in 1937 under the title ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’ ( PO 370–405). The title of these notes alludes to the fact that Wittgenstein begins by commenting on a paper by Russell in which Russell discusses knowledge of causal facts (Russell 1935); but
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most of Wittgenstein’s notes in fact deal with questions concerning doubt, certainty and knowledge which are not discussed in this paper by Russell. Instead there is a clear, if implicit, reference to Moore (‘A philosopher who protests, “We KNOW there’s a chair over there” is simply describing a game’ (PO 381)), and the discussions of doubt and certainty can be read as responses to Moore’s approach to skepticism. Indeed, the similarity between the positions suggested in these notes and some of those advanced later in On Certainty indicates that the role of Wittgenstein’s discussions with Malcolm was in fact as much to remind Wittgenstein of what he had previously thought about these issues as to stimulate him to new lines of thought. 4 In the notes which comprise the first part of the text Wittgenstein is primarily concerned to lay out what he takes to be unsatisfactory about Moore’s response to skepticism, as exemplified by his characteristic claims to knowledge. Wittgenstein takes it that Moore’s view was that in obvious situations (‘Here is one hand’ etc.) we can tell just by introspection that we know what is the case, as if knowledge is ‘an extremely important mental state’ (OC §6) which we can identify in these obvious cases. Wittgenstein’s objection to this view is that no such introspectively identifiable mental state can guarantee the truth of its content ( OC §§12–13); but of course ‘ x knows that p’ entails ‘ p’. So knowledge cannot be a mental state of that kind, and to get a better understanding of what it is we need to understand the role of attributions of knowledge in our language-games (OC §18), a point to which Wittgenstein returns in much more detail in the last part of his notes. Having rejected what he takes to have been Moore’s refutation of skepticism, Wittgenstein himself suggests the different strategy which I mentioned earlier: he argues that the possibility of making a mistake about something requires that one have some understanding of the subject in question, and that the possession of such an understanding implies that one’s judgments in straightforward cases be correct. Wittgenstein then uses this approach to construct a new version of Moore’s famous ‘proof of an external world’: This situation is thus not the same for a proposition like ‘At this distance from the sun there is a planet’ and ‘Here is a hand’ (namely my own hand). For it is not true that a mistake merely gets more and more improbable as we pass from the planet to my own hand. No: at some point it has ceased to be conceivable. (OC §§ 52–4) As we saw earlier Merleau-Ponty makes a similar claim, that there are limits to error and doubt ‘because they are surrounded by an horizon of the world’ (PhP 419). It is not, I think, fanciful to suggest that these lines of argument are similar, in that the kind of understanding which is a prerequisite of the capacity to make a mistake is one which provides one with at least
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 143 ‘an horizon of the world’. Indeed, given Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the fundamental importance of one’s embodiment to one’s grasp of the world, it seems appropriate to attribute to him the thesis that this basic understanding includes an awareness of the presence before one of one’s own hand when it is easily visible. In the next part of On Certainty Wittgenstein develops further this thesis that there are limits to doubt by reinterpreting Moore’s common sense truisms as providing a ‘picture of the world’ which is ‘the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false’ ( OC §94). As discussed earlier, these truisms are the ‘hinge’ certainties which provide a secure basis for our ordinary empirical methods of inquiry. This status comes only from their internal role within our system of beliefs ( OC §136). They are not a priori principles of the kind that rationalist philosophers aim to provide; nor are they externally established by empirical investigations. Insofar as we have reasons for believing them, therefore, these reasons can come only from our acceptance of the understanding of the world and of ourselves which they facilitate. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole). (OC §141)
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it. (OC §144) In other passages Wittgenstein qualifies his description here of the hinge propositions as propositions which ‘stand unshakeably fast’. For when comparing them to the banks of a river which facilitate the flow of water (i.e., ordinary empirical beliefs), he allows that some of these banks move from time to time (OC §§96–9). His thought here seems to be that we modify our ordinary beliefs all the time, and when a sufficient body of the beliefs which ‘lie around’ our core beliefs has altered we may find that we need to modify some of these core beliefs too. 5 Nonetheless, he maintains, revisions of this kind are not just a matter of learning from experience since ‘experience is not the ground for our game of judging’ (OC §131). Instead these revisions involve a kind of ‘conversion’ in which one is ‘brought to look at the world in a different way’ ( OC §92). These remarks introduce the issue of epistemic pluralism, according to which there can be different systems of belief, involving different hinge
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propositions, such that adherents of one system may not be in a position to provide persuasive reasons in favour of their system to those who accept a different one. Where we think of radical differences of belief, such as those between ourselves and say, the ancient Greeks, this possibility does not seem especially threatening. For in these cases the starting-points of the two sides are so far apart that it is scarcely surprising that appeals to experience and reasoning are unlikely to be persuasive. But the question remains whether there is reason to think that, given unlimited time, resources and goodwill, it should be possible to arrive at a reasonable consensus involving beliefs which cluster around a single picture of the world. For if this is not the case, epistemic pluralism threatens to lead to a relativist skepticism which rejects the possibility of objective knowledge. And at one point in On Certainty Wittgenstein expresses some sympathy for a conclusion of this kind: But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. At certain periods men find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice versa. But is there no objective character ( Merkmal ) here? Very intelligent and well-educated people believe in the story of creation in the Bible, while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds for the latter are well known to the former. (OC §336) Although the tone of this passage is rather equivocal, and the case of biblical beliefs is a difficult one to adjudicate since the evidence, for and against, theological beliefs is notoriously contested, this passage indicates Wittgenstein’s acceptance that this type of skeptical challenge to the ‘objective character’ of beliefs needs to be taken seriously. 6 Despite one’s own picture of the world being sure (sicher), the skeptical challenge to it cannot be dismissed by a simple Moorean affirmation of knowledge of its truth. And yet Wittgenstein was not a skeptic. A central feature of his response is that we have no choice but to endorse the standards of rationality that are inherent in our own system. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. (OC §105) The thought here is that we cannot, and should not, attempt to respond to the skeptic’s challenge to our system of beliefs with a complete epoché of
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 145 our standards for reasoning, in which we look for further reasons for choice between different systems. For although we can and do reflectively assess and modify our beliefs all the time, there can be no challenges to our beliefs, no ‘arguments’ which lie altogether beyond our system; we have no choice but to work from within. At first this may appear unsatisfying as we consider the hypothesis of radically alien systems of belief. But Wittgenstein’s claim is that this hypothesis turns out to be empty, in that any substantial challenge to our system of beliefs requires arguments which we can understand; but for each of us ‘the element in which arguments have their life’ is precisely our own system of beliefs. Wittgenstein’s line of thought here can be linked to his discussion of rule-following in Philosophical Investigations. He argues here that in any assessment of what we should think or do, we are bound to run out of reasons: ‘the chain of reasons has an end’ ( PI I §326); and ‘if I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do” ’ (PI I§217). Hence, as he famously concludes: ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly’ (PI I §219). So, returning now to On Certainty, despite the fact that ‘[t]he difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing’ (OC §166),7 we should come to terms with the fact that this is an inescapable feature of our lives, so that the groundlessness of the way in which we are sure of our picture of the world is not ‘akin to hastiness or superficiality’, but is instead part of our ‘form of life’ ( OC §358). Wittgenstein then continues: But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal. (OC §359) This reference to what is ‘animal’ is then taken further in a well-known, but difficult, later note: I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instincts but not ratiocination.8 As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (OC §475) The interpretation of this passage is not straightforward, but I think it should be read in the light of Wittgenstein’s comment in Philosophical Investigations that ‘What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings’ (PI I§415). For this suggests that his claim in On Certainty is not that our picture of the world is the product of our own ‘instincts’, our own ‘primitive’ non-rational motivations. Instead what he has in mind is a kind of natural history, according to which the antecedents of our inherited
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picture of the world lie in the picture of the world acquired instinctively by our primitive ancestors, and then slowly enriched and modified by subsequent generations who, by developing ‘a primitive means of communication’, eventually made it possible for us to have a language in which we can express our system of beliefs and reason critically concerning it. One might want to question the attribution of this speculative natural history to Wittgenstein by bringing into play a later comment from Philosophical Investi gations: ‘we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history—since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes’ ( PI II §xii, 230e). But in fact, I see no reason to regard the natural history sketched above as wholly fictitious, though of course it is massively inexplicit in its positive assumptions concerning the emergence of language. Indeed, it is supported by some remarks by Wittgenstein from his 1937 discussion of doubt and certainty to which I referred earlier, in particular by the role he assigns here to certainty in the development of language: The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language—I want to say—is a refinement. ‘In the beginning was the deed’.9 First there must be firm, hard stone for building, and the blocks are laid rough-hewn one on another. Afterwards it’s certainly important that the stone can be trimmed, that it’s not too hard. The primitive form of the language game is certainty ( Sicherheit ), not uncertainty. For uncertainty could never lead to action. I want to say: it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting. Its function is determined above all by action, which it accompanies. (PO 394–7) In the light of all this, then, how do things stand concerning the relativist challenge to the objectivity of our beliefs which arises from the hypothesis of radically different systems of belief? The situation is, I think, similar to that which applies to his account of rule-following (i.e., we believe ‘blindly’, without grounds or external reasons). But once we appreciate why this is so, why reasons and justifications are inherently internal to our systems of belief, we should also understand why the search for a further external vindication of the system is pointless, so that in pressing such a question ‘you are already going round in a circle’: Well, if everything speaks for a hypothesis and nothing against it—is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such—But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts?—With this question you are already going round in a circle. To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end. (OC §§ 191–2)
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 147 If further reassurance is sought, then one can also bear in mind the ‘natural history’ of one’s beliefs, for this indicates that their roots lie in our practices, in our ‘form of life’, and basic beliefs which are unhelpful or worse are likely to have been discarded. At one point Wittgenstein remarks that his line of thought ‘sounds like pragmatism’ (OC §422)—he probably has William James in mind; but as if to head off the attempt to attribute to him anything like Carnap’s notion of a pragmatic ‘external reason’, he adds: This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground. (OC § 474) So although the appeal to natural history can be reflectively incorporated into our system of belief, where it provides some further reason for confidence in the system, pragmatic considerations by themselves do not provide an external ‘ground’ for the system.
3. Merleau-Ponty on Certainty In turning now to continue my comparison between the positions advanced by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, I begin with a few comments about Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.10 The book was published in 1945, having been written during the war. Merleau-Ponty’s project in the book was to fulfil a project which his earlier work, The Structure of Behaviour, had suggested to him. His conclusion there, reached after an inquiry into the psychology of perception which included a sympathetic assessment of the work of the Gestalt psychologists, had been that natural science, so far from being a way of revealing the basis of perception, is itself dependent upon the fact that ‘laws have meaning only as a means of conceptualising the perceived world’ (SB 145). Merleau-Ponty takes this to imply ‘that the universe of naturalism has not been able to become self-enclosed, and that perception is not an event of nature’ ( SB 145). I shall say more about these striking claims later, but what is important here is that in the light of this conclusion Merleau-Ponty proposes that in order to understand the role of the senses, and the body generally, one should ‘return to perception as a type of original experience in which the real world is constituted in its specificity’ (SB 220); and he then adds in a footnote to this proposal the remark ‘We are defining here the “phenomenological reduction” in the sense given to it in Husserl’s final philosophy’ (SB n. 56, 249). This ‘return to perception’ by means of a ‘phenomenological reduction’ is then the project of his next work, his Phenomenology of Perception. A central theme of this book concerns the role of the body as ‘the subject of perception’ (PhP 213) which sustains our relationship with the world since ‘we are in the world through our bodies and we perceive the world through our bodies’ (PhP 213). In the following dense passage MerleauPonty summarises the complex position he takes himself to have established:
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There is much here that invites further discussion, and I shall come back to it later. But in the present context it is significant that if we take ‘the world’ to be the intentional object of a Wittgensteinian system of beliefs, i.e., to be the world as it is believed to be, then the thought that the world so conceived is ‘the cradle of significations’, ‘the sense of all senses’, ‘the ground of all thoughts’, and ‘the homeland of all rationality’ can be seen to be not so far removed from some of the central themes of Wittgenstein’s position, though I shall argue at the end that there are also significant differences here. Before going into more of these questions and comparisons, however, there are a few mundane details about the relations, direct and indirect, between Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein to lay out. First, although Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was published in 1945, well before Wittgenstein commenced his notes On Certainty in 1949, these works were written at quite different stages in their lives (Wittgenstein was born in 1889, Merleau-Ponty in 1908) and there was no reason for Wittgenstein to have heard of Merleau-Ponty, let alone read his Phenomenology. Equally one could not expect Merleau-Ponty to have heard of Wittgenstein in 1945. One might hope that Merleau-Ponty would subsequently have read and appreciated some of Wittgenstein’s writings (though of course he died in 1961, long before On Certainty was published in 1969). But the only reference to Wittgenstein I know of in Merleau-Ponty’s writings is enigmatic; it occurs in the course notes from his 1959–60 lectures on Husserl’s paper ‘On the Origin of Geometry’. At one point where Merleau-Ponty is discussing Husserl’s account of language, he notes: Husserl takes [11language seriously, gives it an ontological function, makes it bear a page of Being, precisely because he is not enclosed (Wittgenstein) (the British) in the immanence of language, conceived as a thing, but follows its implications of sense . . .]. (HLP 43; translation modified)
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 149 It is not clear here which writings by Wittgenstein Merleau-Ponty has in mind here (or who ‘the British’ are); nor whether the reference to Wittgenstein and the British should be taken to imply that they, unlike Husserl, are ‘enclosed in the immanence of language’—or that they are like Husserl and not so enclosed. The former interpretation seems more likely since it would imply that Merleau-Ponty is saying that Husserl is to be esteemed for an insight concerning language which is missing from the discussions of language by Wittgenstein and the British, which is a more interesting statement than one which simply treats them all on a par. As far as the reference to Wittgenstein is concerned, one might then take the remark about being ‘enclosed in the immanence of language’ to be a comment on the position advanced by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as exemplified perhaps by the famous proposition that ‘ The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (TLP §5.6). But it would in fact be a serious misunderstanding of the Tractatus to suppose that Wittgenstein here conceives of language ‘as a thing’; instead he takes it to be a system of propositional signs, which are facts, not things. And he certainly does ‘follow its implications of sense’ in one sense, in that he takes the requirement that sense be determinate to imply that objects are simple. If one were to turn instead to Wittgenstein’s later writings, then one would encounter immediately his conception of a language-game and it is absolutely clear that when discussing language-games he is not ‘enclosed in the immanence of language, conceived as a thing’, since the point of the conception of a language-game is to show how the meaning of language is inseparable from its use in the context of activities such as house building; and he does follow ‘its implications of sense’ by emphasising its presuppositions, such as agreement in judgment (PI I§242). Indeed, Wittgenstein makes much more of this aspect of language than Husserl does. So whatever interpretation one gives to this passing reference, it is disappointing. The conclusion must be that, for reasons unknown, Merleau-Ponty never acquired a proper understanding and appreciation of Wittgenstein’s writings.12 I now return to the main topic of this section, Merleau-Ponty’s account of certainty, doubt and knowledge, and the similarities and differences between this account and Wittgenstein’s position as discussed in the previous section. A good place to start is with Merleau-Ponty’s affirmation of the ‘absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any particular being’ (PhP 311). I suggested earlier that there are significant similarities between this claim and Wittgenstein’s remarks about the certainty of the general ‘picture of the world’ provided by the Moorean hinge propositions. In considering these similarities further, however, it is useful to start from an assessment of the connection between the positions of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl concerning this issue. Merleau-Ponty uses phrases such as ‘originary opinion’ (PhP 358), ‘primordial opinion’ (PhP 359) and ‘primordial faith’ (PhP 431) to describe our attitude to the world which is absolutely certain, and in a footnote he alludes to Husserl’s ‘Urdoxa or Urglaube’ as his source
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for these phrases ( PhP 359 fn. 96, see PhP 552). He does not refer here to any of Husserl’s texts, but in a later footnote (PhP 382 fn. 14, see PhP 553), he refers to the way in which in Experience and Judgment Husserl ‘grounds knowledge upon an originary doxa’. This note shows that Merleau-Ponty must have found Experience and Judgment , Husserl’s last book, among the papers which Father van Breda brought to Louvain in 1938 and which Merleau-Ponty was able to study there before the German invasion in 1940. It is in this book that Husserl writes about the ‘Urdoxa’ (Husserl 1973: 59), the ‘originary doxa’, and Merleau-Ponty’s references to it indicate his acceptance of something close to Husserl’s doctrine that all justifications of claims to knowledge lead back to ‘the original experience of the lifeworld’ (Husserl 1973: 45), and thus to a kind of ‘pre-predicative experience’ (as Husserl calls it; I discuss the conception of ‘pre-predicative experience’ further below) which provides a ‘justification of doxa which is the realm of ultimately original self-evidence’ (Husserl 1973: 46). But it is, I think, open to question quite how far Merleau-Ponty’s acceptance of Husserl’s position extends. While Merleau-Ponty does agree that the intentionality of judgment depends ‘as its very condition of possibility’ upon the ‘operative intentionality’ (PhP 453) inherent in our experience, it does not follow that he agrees that, in providing justifications for our ordinary beliefs, this experience needs the status of ‘ultimately original self-evidence’. Indeed, when discussing how it is that hallucinations can deceive us, he remarks that it is necessary to ‘strip perception of its apodictic certainty’ ( PhP 359; cf. ‘Preface’ lxxx). So I take it that Merleau-Ponty qualifies Husserl’s conception of the epistemic status of experience: the ‘absolute certainty of the world in general’ does not require a foundation in self-evident experience. Instead the existence of the world is a matter of ‘primordial faith’ ( PhP 431) because it is a condition of the possibility of the inherently fallible process of obtaining knowledge about the ‘particular beings’ that we perceive. Despite his rejection of Husserl’s conception of the original self-evidence of experience, however, Merleau-Ponty does agree with Husserl that our beliefs get their meaning and warrant from perception, which is our ‘ originary knowledge’ (PhP 45) and is therefore ‘the background against which all objects stand out and is thus presupposed by them’ (PhP lxxiv). By contrast Wittgenstein’s view (as we saw earlier) is that ‘experience is not the ground for our game of judging’ (OC §131). So whereas Merleau-Ponty takes it that perception is the (back)ground for our judgments, for Wittgenstein there is no such external ground. Grounds, like reasons and arguments, are essentially internal to our system of beliefs, which include our perceptual judgments, though not the perceptions themselves which cause these judgments and which are not grounds for them. However, there are two significant complications which affect this comparison. The first starts from the fact that Merleau-Ponty holds that the alternatives ‘reason’ and ‘cause’ are not exhaustive: he takes it that there is also an intermediate category of ‘motive’ (PhP 51) which connects the sensible
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 151 phenomena given in experience in such a way that they are perceived as features such as the colours, shape and size of objects located before one—for example, as the colour, shape and size of a glass of water on a table before one. The connections here are not reasons, since no reasoning is involved; nor, he maintains, are they causes since perception is interpretive—sensible phenomena motivate a unified interpretation of the scene before one as ‘the sense it offers’ ( PhP 51). The assumption here that ‘sense’ (i.e., meaning) and causation are incompatible is characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s position, and I shall briefly come back to it later. But continuing now with the account of his position, he holds that it is not only the unity of the perceived world that is motivated in this way, our perceptions also motivate the belief that things are as they appear to us—for example that that there is indeed a glass of water on the table before one. For this connection is not a matter of reasoning; although when we reflect we can bring reasoning to bear on our beliefs about whether things are indeed as they appear, the connection between unreflective perception and belief is immediate and unreasoned. Equally, Merleau-Ponty holds, this connection between perception and belief is not simply causal, for it is crucial that the perception transmits its intentional content to the belief, and this involvement of intentional content in the relationship cannot, he thinks, be just a matter of causation since the content itself is not a causal structure. So when towards the end of the book he affirms, concerning the ways in which ‘things take shape’ and in which we understand ourselves and others, that ‘All that remains is to recognise these phenomena that ground all of our certainties’ ( PhP 431), we should not take his claim to be that the phenomena are ‘reasons’ for our certainties; instead his claim is that they are the ‘motives’ for them. Once Merleau-Ponty’s position is understood in this way, it is clear that it offers a significant alternative to Wittgenstein’s position in On Certainty.13 Nonetheless, the fact that Merleau-Ponty uses the term ‘ground’ to characterise his position is also indicative of the fact that he accepts that there is a sense in which perception provides the foundation for our beliefs, including ‘our certainties’. On this issue, therefore, there remains, in the face of it, a significant disagreement between Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. But at this point a second complication needs to be addressed, which starts from Wittgenstein’s position. As I emphasised earlier, Wittgenstein distinguishes the secure certainty of the core propositions in our system of belief from our knowledge, and maintains that claims to knowledge typically occur in discussions as to whether someone is a reliable source of information about some question, whether ‘he is in a position to know’ (OC §555). Since someone is in a position to know something where they have good evidence for what they think, it follows that ‘Whether I know something depends on whether the evidence backs me up or contradicts me’ ( OC §504). So Wittgenstein certainly does hold that knowledge involves evidence, and thus grounds, although, he thinks, we cannot have grounds for our system of belief and its core certainties as a whole. Thus, one may object, the contrast
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suggested earlier between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty is overstated, since Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty at least agree that objective knowledge needs grounds. Admittedly, they then disagree about these grounds: for Wittgenstein the grounds are supplied by evidence which belongs within systems of belief (which include perceptual judgments) that lack grounds, whereas for Merleau-Ponty it is perception that is the ground of all of our judgments. Despite this difference, and the point emphasised earlier, that Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between two types of knowledge, ‘thetic’ and ‘non-thetic’, in a way which is not found in On Certainty, however, there is more similarity between their positions than the previous comparison allowed for. To pursue further the questions raised by these complications it is necessary to attend to some further features of Merleau-Ponty’s position.
4. ‘Thetic’ and ‘Operative’ Intentionality Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between reasons and motives connects with the distinction I mentioned before between two kinds of knowledge, ‘thetic’ and ‘non-thetic’, since reasons connect the thetic judgments such as those which enter into our ‘objective and detached knowledge of the body’ ( PhP 213) whereas motives connect the non-thetic states which provide ‘this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies’. Early on in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty explains this ‘thetic/non-thetic’ distinction in the following way; Now, as we have just seen, the perception of one’s own body and external perception offer us the example of a non-thetic consciousness, that is, of a consciousness that does not possess the full determination of its objects, the example of a lived logic that does not give an account of itself, . . . Objective thought cannot assimilate these phenomena. (PhP 50–1) So, as applied to knowledge, the contrast is one between a kind of certain knowledge that ‘does not possess the full determination of its objects’ and ‘does not give an account of itself’, and a different kind of knowledge, typically objective knowledge, which does have these characteristics. Wittgenstein does not propose any such distinction between two kinds of knowledge in his discussions of knowledge in On Certainty; hence in comparing their accounts of knowledge we need to consider what the distinction amounts to. When one first encounters it, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction seems reminiscent of Russell’s distinction between propositional knowledge by description and non-propositional knowledge by acquaintance of things and properties (Russell 1912: ch. v). 14 Knowledge by description fits the specification of thetic knowledge since by describing its object it provides both ‘an account’
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 153 of what is known and ‘the full determination of its objects’ in the sense that the description of the object implies its existence and identity. Equally, since knowledge by acquaintance is supposed to involve no more than the immediate presence of an object such as a specific colour to a subject, it appears to satisfy Merleau-Ponty’s requirements for non-thetic knowledge in that it ‘does not give an account of itself’ or determine its object. So Russell’s description/acquaintance distinction seems to fit Merleau-Ponty’s thetic/non-thetic distinction reasonably well. However, this interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction would expose it to the criticisms of knowledge by acquaintance advanced by Wittgenstein in the early sections of his Philosophical Investigations. He argues here that knowledge of the colour one is seeing, for example, requires an understanding of what it would be to see the same colour on another occasion, and that this understanding is not provided just by the simple demonstration of one sample of the colour since ‘an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case’ ( PI I §28). So although visual acquaintance can contribute to a person’s knowledge of some colour where the person already has a general understanding of the role of colour words in the language (PI I §30), there can be no pure knowledge by acquaintance alone, let alone the ‘perfect’ and ‘complete’ knowledge Russell supposed it to be (Russell 1912: 73). Hence, if the Russellian interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s thetic/nonthetic distinction were correct, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction, and the doctrines associated with it, would be vulnerable to a lethal criticism from Wittgenstein. But in truth this interpretation is mistaken. Although the association between thetic knowledge and knowledge by description is reasonable, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of non-thetic knowledge, and nonthetic consciousness generally, is far removed from Russellian knowledge by acquaintance, which Merleau-Ponty also emphatically rejects. Right at the start of Phenomenology of Perception he writes: In beginning the study of perception, we find in language the seemingly clear and straightforward notion of sensation: I sense red or blue, hot or cold. We will see, however, that this is the most confused notion there is . . . (PhP 3) Merleau-Ponty’s reason for rejecting anything like Russellian acquaintance with colours is that he takes it that perception, which includes sensation, always involves a ‘field’ with a spatial figure/ground structure in which colours are manifest as the colours of things. So— The red patch I see on the rug is only red if the shadow that lies across it is taken into account; its quality only appears in relation to the play of light, and thus only as an element in a spatial configuration. (PhP 5)
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This inescapable complexity in perception is compounded by the indeterminacy which arises from the open structure of the perceptual field, whereby changes in light, distance, and orientation induce changes in what is perceived. So there can be no pure acquaintance with a region whose colour is wholly determinate all by itself; even the perceived colour of standard colour samples varies with lighting and context. Thus there can be no question of interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s non-thetic knowledge as Russellian knowledge by acquaintance. What is nonetheless worth remarking here is the difference between the criticisms advanced by Merleau-Ponty and those of Wittgenstein. Where Merleau-Ponty concentrates on the complexity of the perceptual field, Wittgenstein emphasizes the substantive assumptions inherent in our understanding of colour words and other terms which describe potential objects of acquaintance. Are there connections here? Wittgenstein’s key point, that ‘an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case’, is supported by Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the indeterminacy of the perceptual field inherent in an ostensive definition. But whether one might similarly argue from Wittgenstein’s point to Merleau-Ponty’s indeterminacy thesis depends on whether our non-thetic knowledge of the world is conceived as in some way dependent on the use of language. On the face of it this is not the case insofar as non-thetic knowledge ‘does not give an account of itself’. But first we need a better account of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of non-thetic knowledge. A helpful way into this question is to start from another familiar distinction between two kinds of knowledge, that between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. Thetic knowledge is obviously knowledge that; but is ‘know-how’ non-thetic knowledge? It does in a way satisfy all too easily the requirements of not possessing ‘the full determination of its objects’ and exemplifying ‘a lived logic that does not give an account of itself’ ( PhP 50–1). One who knows how to ride a bicycle does not need to ‘give an account’ of this know-how, of how one adjusts one’s posture to be able to negotiate corners and so on. But on reflection, it is clear that MerleauPonty’s conception of the non-thetic knowledge of the world and ourselves provided by perception and employed in action is not itself simply a matter of ‘know-how’; instead, it is the practical understanding of the world and oneself which is manifested in one’s ability to do the things which one knows how to do, such as, indeed, riding a bicycle to work. This practical understanding is primarily a matter of knowledge of one’s location, orientation, situation and context, but also of the intentions and thoughts of one’s companions which is essential to the ability to engage with others in shared activities. As such it also meets the twin requirements of not requiring ‘the full determination of its objects’, e.g., a detailed knowledge of one’s geographical location, or ‘an account of itself’, e.g., an account of how we maintain our normal orientation while moving. By contrast, then, thetic knowledge will typically be the detached, objective knowledge of the world,
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 155 ourselves and others which is not immediately provided by perception and used in action, though of course it is an invaluable resource for them. It is uncontentious that one can distinguish in this way between practical understanding and objective knowledge. The difficult issue concerns the significance of this distinction. Wittgenstein’s examples in On Certainty include both the objective knowledge that 12 × 12 = 144 (OC §43) and the practical knowledge inherent in agency, as in his comment: My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on.—I tell a friend e.g. ‘Take that chair over there’, ‘Shut the door’, etc. etc. (OC §7) But Wittgenstein treats both cases in much the same way: because they concern obvious truths, there is no easy way in which one can be mistaken about them, since understanding them includes the ability to judge correctly about them in normal situations ( OC §81). By contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, the non-thetic practical understanding provided by ‘originary perception’ (PhP 252) has a foundational role with respect to thetic knowledge since it provides the ‘certainty of the thing and the world’ which ‘precedes the thetic knowledge of their properties’ ( PhP 402). Admittedly, for Merleau-Ponty non-thetic perception does not provide reasons for thetic beliefs; instead it provides ‘motives’ for them. But this relationship is one of one-way dependence; as Merleau-Ponty puts it towards the end of Phenomenology of Perception, ‘We uncovered, beneath act or thetic intentionality—and in fact as its very condition of possibility—an operative intentionality’ ( PhP 453) which, we are told at the start of the book in the ‘Preface’ is ‘the intentionality that establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life’ (PhP lxxxii). So for Merleau-Ponty the distinction between objective thetic knowledge and practical non-thetic understanding is central to the structure of human knowledge. To explore this further, we need to consider another distinction which Merleau-Ponty takes over from Husserl and associates with the thetic/nonthetic distinction, that between ‘predicative’ and ‘pre-predicative’ knowledge. ‘Predicative’ knowledge involves acts of predication, i.e., judgment (PhP lxxxii), and is typically expressed in language (PhP lxxix); so it is thetic knowledge. ‘Pre-predicative’ knowledge ( PhP 77), by contrast, is the non-thetic practical knowledge inherent in perception which provides for ‘the natural and pre-predicative unity of the perceived world’ ( PhP lxxxii). We encountered the conception of ‘pre-predicative experience’ earlier in the context of Husserl’s hypothesis of an Urdoxa, an ‘original faith’ involving pre-predicative experience (Husserl 1973: 45). I observed that Merleau-Ponty does not follow Husserl in taking pre-predicative experience to be self-evident; but it remains central to his account of knowledge.
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What makes it ‘pre-predicative’ is that it ‘precedes’ predication, which implies not only that it does not include an act of judgment but also that its intentional content is in some sense antecedent to the predications which are characteristic of language. Just what this sense amounts to, however, is difficult to pin down. At one point Merleau-Ponty expresses the distinction between predicative thetic and pre-predicative non-thetic intentionality in the following way: Husserl’s originality lies beyond the notion of intentionality; rather it is found in the elaboration of this notion and in the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a more profound intentionality, which others have called existence. (PhP 124 n. 57, see p. 520) This passage indicates that pre-predicative intentional content is not constituted by ‘representations’, which include both the supposed bodily representations Merleau-Ponty criticises in his discussion of the phantom limb (PhP 82ff.) and the intellectual representations hypothesised by rationalist philosophers and psychologists which Merleau-Ponty also rejects (PhP 140 n. 99, see PhP 523–5). His positive account of this ‘more profound intentionality’ is then suggested in the following remark: The gesture of reaching one’s hand out toward an object contains a reference to the object, not as a representation, but as this highly determinate thing towards which we project ourselves, beside which we are in anticipation and which we haunt. (PhP 140, translation modified) So we find here, in the context of a discussion of bodily movement as ‘original intentionality’ (PhP 139), a conception of intentional content as inherently relational, directed to ‘this highly determinate thing towards which we project ourselves’. What then needs to be added is that intentional content so conceived, even if it is ‘pre-predicative’, is not altogether ‘preconceptual’ (or ‘non-conceptual’). Instead the ways in which objects and events are referred to in gestures such as reaching will typically draw on indexical spatio-temporal indications of them as, so to speak, ‘over there’ or ‘a moment ago’, where the indications are gestural, although one can subsequently use spoken language to identify and discuss them. At this point we have reached the core of Merleau-Ponty’s position in Phenomenology of Perception— his conception of our non-thetic, prepredicative, understanding of the perceived world which underpins our ordinary thetic, predicative, knowledge of things in such a comprehensive way that he is led to write that ‘the being of the perceived is the prepredicative being toward which our total existence is polarised’ ( PhP 336). Indeed, it is worth quoting in full a passage from the end of Phenomenology
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 157 of Perception to which I have already referred in which Merleau-Ponty presents the unqualified dependence of thetic intentionality on non-thetic intentionality as a conclusion which he has established: We uncovered, beneath act or thetic intentionality—and in fact as its very condition of possibility—an operative intentionality already at work prior to every thesis and every judgment. (PhP 453) There is no sign here of any qualification; this fundamental operative intentionality is said to be at work ‘prior to every thesis and every judgment’. On this issue, then, there is, it would seem, a clear difference between Merleau-Ponty’s foundationalism and Wittgenstein’s holistic conception of our systems of beliefs in On Certainty, despite the complications introduced in the previous section. But there are two ways in which one might argue that even this apparent disagreement turns out, on further investigation, to be a misconception. First, by dissipating the foundationalist appearance of Merleau-Ponty’s position; second, by identifying a foundationalist theme in Wittgenstein’s position comparable to that attributed to Merleau-Ponty. I take these suggestions in turn. In his first book, The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty writes: Man is not a rational animal. The appearance of reason and mind does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed instincts in man. (SB 181) If one associates ‘reason and mind’ with language and predicative judgment, and ‘instincts’ with pre-predicative practical understanding, MerleauPonty’s claim here implies that the emergence of a capacity for predicative judgment ‘does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed’ pre-predicative practical understanding of the world. This does not show that the former capacity does not continue to depend on the latter; but once the dependence between these two types of capacity, between the act intentionality of judgment and the pre-predicative intentionality of practical understanding is regarded as a two-way interdependence, the significance of the claim that the pre-predicative intentionality of practical understanding is ‘already at work prior to every thesis and every judgment’ has been qualified, since the priority thesis has to be understood to allow for the fact that this prepredicative intentionality is not a ‘self-enclosed sphere’, but is also informed by predicative knowledge of the world. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty provides examples of this relationship in his discussion of the acquisition of skills (‘habits’), such as learning to type at a keyboard or to play the organ (PhP 145–8). For in these cases, predicative knowledge of the keyboard (etc.) is transformed into a new ‘habit’ which enters into our practical understanding of ourselves and the world:
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Thus the capacity for assimilating a new signification shows that non-thetic, operative intentionality can be informed by a ‘signification’ which is initially presented in thetic, predicative knowledge. So the basic foundationalist thesis that predicative knowledge depends, in every case, on pre-predicative understanding has to be understood to allow that this pre-predicative understanding can be enriched, or extended, by significations which are drawn, in the first instance, from predicative knowledge. Yet while this qualification is significant, there is no sign in Phenomenology of Perception of Merleau-Ponty withdrawing his claim that pre-predicative intentionality is ‘prior to every thesis’. Thus if the apparent disagreement here between Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein is to be overcome it will have to be by identifying a foundationalist theme in Wittgenstein’s position comparable to that affirmed by Merleau-Ponty. To consider this suggestion, I want to go back to the passage from Wittgenstein’s 1937 notes, part of which I repeat here: Language—I want to say—is a refinement. “In the beginning was the deed”. ... I want to say: it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting. Its function is determined above all by action, which it accompanies. (PO 394–7) The claim here that language has a ‘foundation . . . in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting’ employs a distinction between language and action which is comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s predicative/pre-predicative distinction; and the fact that Wittgenstein writes here of action as a ‘foundation’ implies, on the face of it, that this distinction has precisely the foundational significance that Merleau-Ponty attributes to it. However, for Wittgenstein this applies only to the initial emergence of language. Once language-games are up and running, the need for ‘steady ways of living, regular ways of acting’ will be met by ways of living and acting which are informed by language, in practices which, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s idioms, are penetrated by new significations so that they assimilate ‘a new meaningful core’. And now the question is whether there is good reason to continue to distinguish between predicative judgment and pre-predicative knowledge and give the latter a foundationalist role with respect to the former. Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen, seems to think that this is the case. But once one understands that the point of the conception of a language-game is precisely to emphasise the
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 159 interdependence between language and action in our practices, there seems no good reason to take it that the predicative component of these practices which is manifest in what is being said is dependent upon our practical understanding of our situation in a way in which the latter is not equally dependent on the former. Indeed, for Wittgenstein the core presupposition of our language-games is that we are able to sustain agreement in judgment concerning particular cases; so if anything, it is the predicative component of our practices which he takes to be fundamental. However, what seems central to his position is really the interrelatedness of action and language. Thus, going back now to a passage cited earlier from On Certainty— My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on.—I tell a friend e.g. ‘Take that chair over there’, ‘Shut the door’, etc. etc. (OC § 7) —we see that Wittgenstein illustrates here the connection between knowledge and action by reference to what he tells his friend. There is no predicative/pre-predicative distinction in play here. It might be suggested that the ‘rule-following’ considerations provide a better way of identifying a foundationalist theme in Wittgenstein’s position that resembles Merleau-Ponty’s position. For in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Wittgenstein famously states that Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our languagegame. It characterises what we call description. (RFM 330)15 To connect this remark with Merleau-Ponty’s position, however, it needs to be appropriate to take it that ‘our language-game’ exemplifies predicative, thetic judgments, whereas ‘following according to the rule’ involves the exercise of non-thetic, pre-predicative understanding, so that the latter is being said to be ‘FUNDAMENTAL’ to the former. Since it is obvious that language-games involve predicative judgment, the issue here resolves around the significance of the phrase ‘following according to the rule’. To obtain a proper understanding of this phrase it is, I think, essential to place the passage in which it occurs in the context of the preceding remark: Someone asks me: What is the colour of this flower? I answer: ‘red’.— Are you absolutely sure? Yes, absolutely sure! But may I not have been deceived and called the wrong colour ‘red’? No. The certainty with which I call the colour ‘red’ is the rigidity of my measuring-rod, it is the rigidity from which I start. When I give descriptions, that is not to be brought into doubt. This simply characterises what we call describing.
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Two points are immediately noticeable here: first, Wittgenstein is writing about descriptions of colour, and not, for example, proofs; second, the emphasis here is on certainty. Wittgenstein claims that our capacity for describing colours starts out from our certainty concerning straightforward cases (e.g., that this flower is red, a certainty which constitutes ‘the rigidity of my measuring rod’). The way in which Wittgenstein then ends this first remark implies that what ‘characterizes what we call describing’, at least when one is describing colours, is precisely this certainty concerning straightforward cases which provides us with, as it were, ‘the rigidity of my measuring rod’. The next remark ends with a very similar comment ‘It characterizes what we call description’; and although ‘it’ here refers to ‘Following according to the rule’, the meaning of this comment must be similar to that of the earlier one. The obvious way to connect them, therefore, is to regard this second remark as a generalisation of the first, so that in the case of describing colours ‘following according to the rule’ is a matter of relying on our certainty concerning straightforward cases (‘this flower is red’) to describe more complex colours. The general point here, therefore, concerns an epistemological foundation of our language-game: what is ‘FUNDAMENTAL’ to our language-game is the certainty concerning obvious cases which provides us with ‘rigid measuring rods’ which we can apply to situations where the facts are not obvious. As such, therefore, this claim simply anticipates the position developed in much more detail in On Certainty. Indeed, there is an extended discussion of our understanding of colour words in On Certainty (§§522–30) in which Wittgenstein develops and explores further the position he has put forward in these two remarks. This account of the significance of Wittgenstein’s remark is reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘the certainty of the thing and the world precedes the thetic knowledge of their properties’ ( PhP 402). However, the details do not match up in such a way that this discussion of rule-following provides a basis for attributing to Wittgenstein a foundationalist position comparable to that advanced by Merleau-Ponty. For there is nothing non-thetic or prepredicative in the conception of rule-following as reliance on the certainty of our judgments in straightforward cases such as ‘This flower is red’. Furthermore, as the more extensive discussion in On Certainty indicates, it was not Wittgenstein’s view that our certainty concerning these straightforward cases provides a ground for our judgments in more difficult ones; instead the system of beliefs (judgments), which includes the distinctive ‘rigid’ certainty of ‘This flower is red’, just needs to fit together as a whole (cf. OC §144). Thus what is ‘FUNDAMENTAL’ to our language-game about following according to a rule is the general fact that ‘the truth of certain empirical
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 161 propositions belongs to our frame of reference’ ( OC §83). It is not that these empirical certainties provide a foundation for our system of beliefs. 16
5. The Subjective World The conclusion of this discussion is, therefore, that, despite all the complications and qualifications discussed in the previous section, there is a clear difference between Wittgenstein’s holistic conception of our systems of beliefs in On Certainty and Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that there is a kind of pre-predicative practical understanding (an ‘operative intentionality’) which is ‘already at work prior to every thesis’ (‘act intentionality’) and thus in particular prior to predicative, propositional knowledge of the world. In this final section I want to explore Merleau-Ponty’s reasons for this position and then consider how far Wittgenstein might be sympathetic to them. In the course of the preceding discussion, it will have become apparent that Merleau-Ponty connects the predicative/pre-predicative distinction with an objective/subjective distinction, where the subjectivity of a state such as perception is understood as arising from its essential dependence upon a relationship with the subject as such, so that knowledge is objective where no such dependence upon the subject is involved. Objective knowledge is certainly predicative, and even though there is subjective predicative knowledge, expressed through indexical judgments, Merleau-Ponty implies that what is important about predicative judgment is that it brings with it a capacity for objective knowledge. By contrast pre-predicative knowledge is inherently subjective since it is structured by non-representational indexical relationships between the subject and the world. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s epistemological thesis of the priority of the pre-predicative over the predicative indicates that he assigns priority to experiences informed by subjective relationships over objective knowledge. But more needs to be said about the objective/subjective distinction and the types of priority that can be brought into play in this context. It is obvious from the perspectival character of perception that perception is inherently subjective in Merleau-Ponty’s sense; there is no objective ‘view from nowhere’. Nonetheless, it is also characteristic of perception that we perceive things as objects whose properties are not intrinsically perspectival but are instead objective. It is, for example, immediately apparent to us that things do not change shape and size just because we move in relation to them; instead, their properties appear to us as causes of their perspectival appearance, which changes as we move in relation to them and vice-versa—as Merleau-Ponty acknowledges: Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it which we have had or could have. (PhP 69)
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Thus although perception is subjective, it presents the perceived world as objective. This yields the common sense position that while there is an inescapable subjective aspect to experience, and thus to our evidence for our beliefs, the world we perceive, and as we believe it to be, is objective. We can provide subjective descriptions of many features of the world; but these descriptions draw upon relationships, typically spatio-temporal, between ourselves and these features which are not essential to these features. So whereas what is subjective has priority in the order of knowledge, 17 the objective conception of the world has priority in the order of being. This common sense position is too simple: self-knowledge, for example, is knowledge of facts that are themselves essentially subjective; and the old debates about whether colours are ‘secondary’ qualities suggest that some features of the perceived world are neither straightforwardly subjective nor fully objective, but have an intermediate ‘anthropocentric’ status.18 It is not, however, necessary to attempt to present here a full account of these matters; instead, switching attention back to Merleau-Ponty, the point to grasp is that he holds that the objective conception of the world, which he associates with the natural sciences as well as common sense, is inherently derivative and incomplete. Thus at the start of Phenomenology of Perception, in the ‘Preface’, he writes: The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the secondary expression. (PhP lxxii) A key stage in ‘awakening’ this experience comes from a critical examination of the objective conception of the body: Let us, then, consider objective thought at work in the constitution of our body as an object, since this is a decisive moment in the genesis of the objective world. We will see that in science itself, one’s own body evades the treatment which it wanted to impose upon it. And since the genesis of the objective body is but a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads that unite it to its surroundings . . . . (PhP 74) The conclusion, then, is that just as the objective conception of the body is only ‘an impoverished image’ of the body as we experience it ( PhP 456), the objective conception of the world is inherently ‘derivative’ ( PhP 393). Hence: The world, in the full sense of the word, is not an object; it has an envelope of objective determinations, but also fissures and lacunae through
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 163 which subjectivities become lodged in it, or rather which are these subjectivities themselves. (PhP 349) To support this thesis, Merleau-Ponty provides many rich and illuminating considerations which I have no space to examine here. 19 But as he develops his position, it becomes increasingly clear that what motivates his commitment to it is a distinctive version of transcendental idealism whose subject is not the abstract non-empirical self of classical rationalism but is instead the engaged, embodied agent whose perceptions and movements give meaning (sens) to the perceived world, especially its spatio-temporal form. Thus, to repeat a passage quoted earlier: The subject is being-in-the-world and the world remains ‘subjective’, since its texture and its articulations are sketched out by the subject’s movement of transcendence. (PhP 454) In developing this position, Merleau-Ponty emphasises that it differs from that presented by Husserl in writings such as Ideas I in which Husserl writes of ‘a sense-bestowing consciousness which, for its part, exists absolutely’ (Husserl 1982: 129). Husserl’s position gives primacy to predicative acts which ‘bestow’ meaning on experience, whereas the conclusion of MerleauPonty’s long discussion of motricity, the capacity for bodily movement and agency, is that: The experience of the body leads us to recognize an imposition of sense that does not come from a universal constituting consciousness, a sense that adheres to certain contents. My body is this meaningful core that behaves as a general function and that nevertheless exists and that is susceptible to illness. (PhP 148) Thus it is through our embodiment that sense is ‘imposed’ on things in such a way that ‘we are condemned to meaning ’ (PhP 1xxxiv).20 One might wonder what the difference is supposed to be between the ‘bestowal’ ( donner) of sense and the ‘imposition’ ( imposition) of sense? In the former case Merleau-Ponty almost always just uses Husserl’s term Sinngebung , indicating that he has in mind Husserl’s conception in Ideas I , which MerleauPonty takes to be a predicative act. By contrast Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the imposition of sense is of something which informs pre-predicative experience. So the ‘bestowal’/‘imposition’ distinction is a marker for the predicative/pre-predicative distinction. Indeed, looking back to MerleauPonty’s thesis of priority of pre-predicative experience, one can see that it is the fundamental sense-imposing role of the body which implies the priority
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of this type of experience since its pre-predicativity expresses the way in which our embodiment brings meaning to our lives. One might still wonder whether this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s position is correctly regarded as a form of transcendental idealism, since he himself describes his position as one which stands between the alternatives of realism and idealism (PhP 454). But this description takes it that ‘idealism’ is the view that the world is ‘the visible unfolding of a constituting thought’ (PhP 454), the kind of idealism exemplified by Husserl’s sense-bestowing consciousness which Merleau-Ponty explicitly repudiates ( PP lxxv). Nonetheless, as the passage quoted above shows, he affirms a bodily ‘imposition of sense’, which is fundamentally idealist in conception; and he describes this imposition of sense as ‘transcendental’ in the following passage: Along with the natural world and the social world, we have discovered that which is truly transcendental, which is not the collection of constitutive operations through which a transparent world, without shadows and without opacity, is spread out in front of an impartial spectator, but rather the ambiguous life where the Ursprung of transcendences takes place . . . . (PhP 382) This ‘ambiguous life where the Ursprung of transcendences takes place’ is engaged perception, perception which is informed by a bodily imposition of sense. Its transcendental status is reflected in a memorable passage in which Merleau-Ponty invokes Valéry’s poetry 21 to characterise his conception of perception: All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception. Since perception is the ‘flaw’ in this ‘great diamond’, there can be no question of describing it as one of the facts that happen in the world, for the picture of the world will always include this lacuna that we are and by which the world itself comes into existence. (PhP 215) It is the status of perception, as the Ursprung ‘by which the world comes into existence, which implies that ‘there can be no question of describing it [perception] as one of the facts that happens in the world’—though, more accurately, Merleau-Ponty’s claim should be that ‘there can be no question of describing it [perception] as just one of the facts that happens in the world’ for it is central to his conception of the ‘ambiguous’ status of perception that it is ‘simultaneously creating ( naturant ) and created ( naturé)’. The message here is the same as that which we encountered earlier, in the conclusion of The Structure of Behavior, ‘that the universe of naturalism has not been able to become self-enclosed, and that perception is not an event of nature’ (SB 145). Furthermore, it is not only perception’s bodily ‘imposition of sense’ that is transcendental; the ‘sense’ thus imposed has
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 165 the same status since it carries an essential reference back to the bodily subject. Indeed, it is this sense which constitutes the ‘fissures and lacunae through which subjectivities become lodged in [the world], or rather which are these subjectivities themselves’ ( PhP 349). For Merleau-Ponty, the most important aspect of these subjectivities is time since ‘The ideal of objective thought is simultaneously grounded upon and left in ruins by temporality’ (PhP 349), a comment which anticipates the conclusion of his chapter on ‘Temporality’, that ‘time is neither a real process nor an actual succession that I could limit myself simply to recording. It is born of my relation with things’ (PhP 434). A final aspect of this transcendental idealism concerns causation. I mentioned earlier in connection with Merleau-Ponty’s interesting conception of the ‘motives’ which connect and unify sensible phenomena that he holds that this type of connection is not causal, because it concerns the way in which diverse phenomena are connected as features of a unified scene which expresses ‘the sense it offers’ ( PhP 51). So again, some transcendental ‘imposition of sense’ is conceived to be at work in the ‘motivated’ connection of phenomena, and Merleau-Ponty takes this to exclude a causal account of this connection. While this line of thought is understandable, it is worth noting that it is being assumed here that causation itself does not belong among the types of sense that are imposed by perception. If the contrary assumption were made—and one can think of Kant’s transcendental idealism here—it might well appear legitimate, on the contrary, to regard Merleau-Ponty’s motivated connections as a type of causal connection that is appropriate for sensible phenomena. At this point I should add that just as Kant combined his transcendental idealism with empirical realism (indeed the former is supposed to provide a warrant for the latter), Merleau-Ponty also combines his version of transcendental idealism with his own form of empirical realism, despite the fact that he rejects the ‘realism’ of those who hold that, for example, perception is just ‘one of the facts that happen in the world’. Merleau-Ponty certainly holds that the objects of perception are typically real objects with real properties; it is only those aspects of the perceived world which manifest the body’s imposition of sense, such as spatial orientation and temporal order, which are essentially subjective and thus not transcendentally real. What is nonetheless distinctive of Merleau-Ponty’s empirical realism is his insistence that empirical reality is constrained by the Berkeley-inspired condition that ‘we cannot ultimately conceive of a thing that could be neither perceived nor perceptible’ ( PhP 334), which leads him to the notorious claim that ‘Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be’ ( PhP 456). The resulting position has some similarities with the ‘anti-realism’ of those who hold that there cannot be truths, for example concerning the past, whose truth transcends all possible verification because all the relevant evidence has been destroyed. 22 But in both cases the position looks to be based on a misguided belief that the limits of perception (or evidence) are the limits of the world.
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To pursue this issue further, however, would lead one from epistemology into metaphysics and thus beyond the limits of this paper. Returning instead to transcendental idealism, one familiar anxiety concerns the apparent implication that for each subject there is their own ‘subjective’ world, essentially dependent on relationships with that subject. ‘Metaphysical’ versions of this position respond to this anxiety by holding that in some sense there is just one ultimate subject. 23 That option is plainly not available to Merleau-Ponty. Instead his response starts from the thesis that although there are indefinitely many embodied subjects of perception, the way in which perception imposes sense is essentially the same for everyone. Perception, he writes, ‘takes place within an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us as anonymous’ ( PhP 223), so that ‘if I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, not that I perceive’ ( PhP 223). Thus, he suggests, although the sense (e.g., the visual perspective) imposed by each subject is not the same, because these senses are all of the same type they can be readily harmonised. Just as one person’s changing perceptions over time can be integrated into an extended experience of one changing situation, the perceptions of different people can be shared in such a way that their senses are harmonised as perceptions of just one world. The crucial assumption Merleau-Ponty introduces here is that the experiences of different people can be harmonised in this way; this is the intersubjectivity of experience. Whereas the subjectivity of experience implies that its content is essentially subject-related, its intersubjectivity implies that this content can be fitted alongside that of other subjects. Of course, differences and disagreements remain possible; but the intersubjectivity of experience implies that it is these differences which require explanation, and not the normal expectation of agreement. Hence, Merleau-Ponty concludes, the unity and uniqueness of the world is both sustained and vindicated by intersubjectivity: The phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that shines forth at the intersection of my experiences and at the intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into each other. The phenomenological world is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which establishes their unity through the taking up of my past experiences into my present experiences, or of the other person’s experience into my own. (PhP lxxxiv) Merleau-Ponty discusses intersubjectivity at length in the chapter on ‘Others and the Social World’ in part II of Phenomenology of Perception. But one of the odd features of the book is that he does not here confront a challenge for which he has himself prepared the ground by his earlier discussions of the famous case of Johann Schneider, the former German soldier with brain damage whose handicaps had been studied and described in
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 167 detail by Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. Merleau-Ponty proposes that ‘all of Schneider’s disorders can be reduced to a unity’ ( PhP 137) which he describes in the following famous passage: Let us say . . . that the life of consciousness—epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life—is underpinned by an ‘intentional arc’ that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with intelligence, and the unity of sensibility and motricity. And this is what ‘goes limp’ in the disorder. (PhP 137) Merleau-Ponty does not state that this ‘intentional arc’ is the fundamental pre-predicative operative intentionality discussed earlier. But this identification fits with its role as ‘underpinning’ the life of consciousness, such as ‘epistemic life’. One might then wonder how ‘our ideological situation, and our moral situation’ can be altogether pre-predicative; but an implication of the discussion of habits mentioned above is that the body has the capacity to assimilate new meanings (PhP 148), and it is a familiar fact that we are prone to assimilate the ideological and moral attitudes we encounter in childhood in such a way that we ‘project’ them unthinkingly along with the more fundamental assumptions which provide for the unity of the senses. So it looks plausible to take it that this intentional arc is an aspect of the fundamental operative intentionality, and I shall assume that this identification is correct, although this point is not crucial to the issue I want to discuss. This issue concerns the implications of Schneider’s profound handicaps, and in particular the question of whether the normal assumption of intersubjectivity does not apply in his case. The case for an affirmative answer is that once the ‘intentional arc’ which underpins Schneider’s ‘personal core and his power of existing’ (PhP 136) has become severely attenuated, with the result that his capacities, interests, and concerns (as described by Gelb and Goldstein) are very different from those of a normal person, it is not appropriate to speak of ‘the intersection of [his] experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into each other’ or of our ‘taking up . . . [his] experience into [our] own’. Yet these are the marks of intersubjectivity. But if intersubjectivity fails, the uniqueness implied by talk of ‘ the intersubjective phenomenological world’ is not warranted, and instead a pluralism of subjective phenomenological worlds will have to be accepted. The issue that arises here is reminiscent of that discussed earlier in connection with the hypothesis of epistemic pluralism in On Certainty, arising from the possibility of radically different systems of belief with different hinge propositions, and the question of there being a mark of the objectivity of any one of them. But for the moment, I shall postpone a comparison
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between the ways in which Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty deal with this issue in order to concentrate on Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of it. In thinking about the challenge to Merleau-Ponty, one should recognise that the issue for him is not primarily one of our not having grounds for belief in an objective world, given his view that the objective world is inherently derivative and incomplete. It is rather whether it is legitimate for him to write of ‘the world’ (i.e., the intersubjective phenomenological world) ‘as the primordial unity of all our experiences on the horizon of our life and as the unique term of all of our projects’ and thus as ‘the homeland of all rationality’ (PhP 454). For if there is a pluralism of worlds which cannot be harmonised by the assumption of intersubjectivity, then it looks as though there is, for example, no single ‘homeland of all rationality’, in which case there is here a significant skeptical challenge. Insofar as Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Schneider suggests a response to this challenge, it is that the account given by Gelb and Goldstein of Schneider’s situation implies that his world is a truncated version of ours, of the world of a normal human adult; indeed, Merleau-Ponty reports, this is also how things seem to him: ‘Schneider would still like to form political and religious opinions, but he knows that it is useless to try’ ( PhP 136). Hence even if the assumption of intersubjectivity is not warranted and Schneider’s world is different from ours, this pluralist conclusion does not after all pose a significant skeptical threat; for if Schneider’s world is just a cut down version of our world, then our world can remain the ‘homeland of all rationality’ since Schneider’s world does not include a serious alternative system of rationality. The merits of this response obviously depend on whether the account provided by Gelb and Goldstein of Schneider’s situation is satisfactory, and this is not a matter that can now be assessed, though we have now learnt to be much more sensitive and receptive to the voices of the disabled than used to be the case. A similar point arises in the context of MerleauPonty’s discussion of a schizophrenic subject who suffers hallucinations. Merleau-Ponty describes the situation as one in which the subject’s life has been disrupted by the intrusion of deceptive hallucinations which are not perceptions but masquerade as such within the subject’s consciousness ( PhP 351), and his diagnosis of this case is that the ‘faith’ 24 which normally ‘carries us beyond subjectivity’ and ‘places us in the world’ has been truncated by the hallucinations, so that the subject ‘becomes bogged down in [their] private appearances’ (PhP 358–9). As a result, it seems clear that the normal assumption of intersubjectivity has broken down—we cannot incorporate ‘[his] experience into [our] own’. But as with the discussion of Schneider, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion does not suggest that the fact that the life-world of the schizophrenic is very different from that of a healthy adult poses a significant skeptical challenge to the assumption that the latter’s world is ‘the homeland of all rationality’. This assumption is one that subsequent discussions of schizophrenia have called into question, and Merleau-Ponty’s discussion in Phenomenology of
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 169 Perception of the challenge posed by those who are labelled ‘schizophrenic’ now appears rather imperceptive. 25 This impression is reinforced by the position he takes in some popular radio talks which he gave in 1948 and which have been published as The World of Perception. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty argues that we need to recognise the different worlds of ‘children, primitive people, the sick, or more so still, animals’ ( WP 72); but on the other hand, he claims that these worlds lack coherence, whereas the world of the ‘healthy, civilised, adult human being strives for coherence’ (WP 72). Hence ‘Adult thought, normal and civilized, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought’ ( WP 73)—so again, the very idea of a skeptical challenge to it is banished by an assertion of its superiority. It is hard not to be disappointed by Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of this issue. He simply fails to consider that where intersubjectivity fails and there is a plurality of worlds, there is a potential for a skeptical challenge to the preeminence of the world of those who are described as ‘healthy, civilised, adult human being[s]’. Indeed, it was precisely the insight of one of his early critics, the young Michel Foucault, that the history of social responses to ‘folly’ shows that there is a serious challenge here that needs to be taken seriously (as he demonstrated in his masterpiece Folie et Déraison— Foucault 1961). At this point I return to Wittgenstein and his discussion of these issues in On Certainty. Two points can be made immediately: first, as indicated earlier, Wittgenstein did recognise the skeptical challenge that arises from epistemic pluralism (cf. OC §336); second, there is a marked difference in the tone of the two discussions. Merleau-Ponty’s remark that ‘Adult thought, normal and civilized, is better than childish, morbid or barbaric thought’ is very alien to Wittgenstein’s non-judgmental use of examples from other cultures: Men have believed that they could make rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. (OC §92) The more profound point, however, is whereas Merleau-Ponty takes it that he has shown that there is one coherent, intersubjective, phenomenological world which normal adults share and which is the homeland of all rationality (PhP 454), Wittgenstein does not think that anything of this kind can, or indeed needs to, be shown. That is, to put the point in his terms, we should not seek to show that our system of beliefs is ‘the homeland of all rationality’. Any reasons that we can make sense of already have a place within our system of beliefs since it is ‘the element in which arguments have their life’ (OC §105). So once we have reflectively satisfied ourselves about
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our beliefs and our reasons for them, there is nothing more we can do to justify them. Instead we must learn to live with the ‘groundlessness of our believing’ (OC §166). As a consequence, the reasons we have are inherently non-exclusive; they do not exclude there being other systems of belief with reasons of which we can make no sense as reasons. So even though we try to satisfy ourselves that, so far as we can tell, our beliefs are rational, we have no reason for holding that our system of beliefs is all-inclusive, that it is the homeland of all rationality. Having set out this comparison of the responses of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty to the skeptical challenge arising from epistemic pluralism, I turn finally, and briefly, to some more speculative comparisons concerning the positions I have attributed to Merleau-Ponty concerning the imposition of sense and transcendental idealism. I have suggested here that MerleauPonty’s thesis of the priority of pre-predicative knowledge as compared with predicative knowledge derives from his account of the fundamental pre-predicative imposition of sense that informs perception and action. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, meaning arises in the context of the languagegames within which people engage with each other in a great variety of activities. So for Wittgenstein meaning is typically an ingredient of predicative acts—questions, answers, statements, and commands. Hence while there is no reason for Wittgenstein to deny that we have the kind of nonthetic pre-predicative practical understanding which Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, there is no reason for him to give it any special priority as compared with our familiar predicative knowledge of the world, both subjective and objective; and there is equally no reason for him to prioritise subjective descriptions of the world as compared with objective ones, except insofar as the Moorean certainties which comprise the core of our systems of belief are typically subjective. Finally, there is the issue of transcendental idealism. I have argued that Merleau-Ponty presents a novel form of transcendental idealism, founded upon the role of perception in giving form to the perceived world. Can one say anything similar about Wittgenstein’s position? Does the fundamental role of language-games in the constitution of meaning bring with it a form of ‘linguistic idealism’? Does the possibility of language impose form on what can be said? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein had maintained that a proposition (Satz) represents a possible situation in virtue of the fact it shares the logical form of that which it represents; and he held that because logic is in this way a mirror-image (Spiegelbild ) of the world, it is ‘transcendental’ (TLP §6.13). So there is here a kind of transcendental idealism, though Wittgenstein emphasizes logic is a method of inference and not a system of fundamental truths. But I take it to be a feature of the change in his position in Philosophical Investigations, with the new emphasis on the multiplicity of language-games which involve a variety of speech acts of which representation (Darstellung ) is but one ( PI I §§ 23–4), that he does not seek to exhibit some definite system of analysis or inference as a transcendental condition of the possibility of language-games in general. 26
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 171 He does of course emphasize that language-games involve practices which sustain the rules that guide the language and that these practices require general agreement in judgment. But although he argues that these requirements exclude a language whose rules are purely ‘private’, nothing specific is prescribed concerning the general form of language. So there is here no trace of transcendental idealism. It is, therefore, no cause for concern that in On Certainty Wittgenstein just treats idealism as a form of skepticism ( OC §37). But what is more important is the difference between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty concerning the role for any reference to what is ‘transcendental’ in epistemology (and philosophy in general). I discussed earlier the emphasis on naturalism in Wittgenstein’s later writings, which is exemplified by his statement in On Certainty ‘I want to regard man here as an animal ( Tier)’ (OC §475). Although the significance of talk of what is ‘natural’ (or ‘animal’) is always contestable, the terms ‘natural’ and ‘transcendental’ are generally used as contraries, and this certainly applies to Wittgenstein’s later writings. Thus, Wittgenstein’s later naturalism stands in sharp contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have discovered that which is ‘truly transcendental’ ( PhP 382). Admittedly Merleau-Ponty then mitigates and complicates his claim by maintaining the ‘ambiguous life’ which is truly transcendental is ‘ambiguous’ because it combines what is naturé (formed by nature) with what is naturans (gives form to nature) ( PhP 383), which suggests that he does not take it that what is transcendental is not also, in some sense, natural. But it is the claim that because perception gives form to nature it is not ‘an event of nature’ (SB 145) or ‘one of the facts that happens in the world’ (PhP 215), that is alien to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It manifests the wish for a fundamental philosophical explanation of facts, when, for Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything’ (PI I §126).
Notes 1 Wittgenstein is probably alluding here to a passage in Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World’; see Moore (1993: 166). I do not myself think that Moore is here offering a response to skeptical arguments, but it is not important in this context whether or not this is correct. 2 However, one might add here that in fact many of the considerations which Merleau-Ponty advances arise from comparisons between the everyday experiences which the reader is assumed to enjoy and the abnormal experiences of those with serious handicaps (a phantom limb, brain damage, aphasia, etc.). So there is a comparative aspect to Merleau-Ponty’s method of inquiry too which is similar in this respect to Wittgenstein’s method of inquiry, though Merleau-Ponty does not explain how his references to the abnormal experiences of others ‘loosen the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear’. 3 The editors divide this part of the text into two parts (§§66–192, §§193–299), but there is no obvious reason for this division since it just reflects the fact that one notebook ends with §192 and the next one starts off with §193 (see the ‘Addendum to “The Wittgenstein Papers” ’ (PO 509)). However, the dates
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attached to notes §287 onward show that there was a six-month gap between §299 and §300, so it is right to treat §§300–676 (which is an uninterrupted sequence of notes) as a separate part. 4 There are a few brief remarks about certainty at the end of part II xi of Philosophical Investigations (224–8). These remarks are taken from notes which Wittgenstein wrote in Dublin in 1949 before going to the United States, and which have been published as his Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology volume I; see esp. §§ 882–92. But these comments primarily concern self-knowledge and thus do not directly anticipate the main themes of On Certainty. 5 Wittgenstein’s remark that: ‘Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks in favour of the opposite’ ( OC §93) exemplifies one type of case in which a hinge proposition has to be abandoned. What Wittgenstein wrote in 1950 was fair enough then, but it is no longer true for us, given the success of the Apollo programme in 1969. 6 Wittgenstein’s phrase here, ‘objectives Merkmal ’, might also be translated as ‘mark of objectivity’, which is not quite what is suggested by the translation ‘objective character’. 7 There is striking reversal in Wittgenstein’s metaphors here: the fact that, as he puts it in Philosophical Investigations, one reaches ‘bedrock’ in the justifications for one’s beliefs becomes, in the idiom of On Certainty, the fact that these beliefs are ‘groundless’. ‘Bedrock’ is not, so to speak, a ‘ground’. 8 This is an odd translation of the French word ‘Raisonnement ’ (reasoning) which Wittgenstein uses. 9 Wittgenstein is here quoting the famous line from Goethe’s Faust : ‘Im Amfang war der Tat’, which he also quotes in On Certainty §402. 10 It may be asked whether my concentration here on Phenomenology of Perception is appropriate; in particular whether one should not also take into account some of Merleau-Ponty’s later texts, such as The Visible and the Invisible. My main reason for not giving these texts much attention here is that they do not include significant discussions of the topic of this paper. At the time of his death Merleau-Ponty was working towards new accounts of perception and language, such as those sketched in Chapter 4 ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’ of The Visible and the Invisible. I believe that these accounts do have some implications for debates about certainty and knowledge; but these implications are not explicit in these late texts, and it would require a good deal of interpretive work to identify them with confidence. So although that is a task worth undertaking, it is one for a separate paper. 11 The square bracket indicates that the text which follows was inserted by Merleau-Ponty as a comment. 12 One might also ask whether Wittgenstein had any familiarity with Husserl’s writings which would provide an indirect point of contact between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. So far as I am aware, there are no references to Husserl in Wittgenstein’s writings; but after he returned to the study of philosophy in 1929, he wrote for a time about ‘phenomenology’, as in the following remarks from the start of his 1930 Philosophical Remarks: A recognition of what is essential and what inessential in our language if it is to represent, a recognition of which parts of our language are wheels turning idly, amounts to the construction of a phenomenological language. Physics differs from phenomenology in that it is concerned to establish laws. Phenomenology only establishes the possibilities. Thus, phenomenology would be the grammar of the description of those facts on which physics builds its theories. (PR 51)
Wittengenstein and Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge and Certainty 173 The references here to phenomenology are striking; but are they to phenomenology as conceived by Husserl? Husserl certainly intended to identify ‘what is essential and what inessential’ (see, for example, the opening pages of Ideas I)— but not, on the face of it, by means of an inquiry into ‘what is essential and what inessential in our language if it is to represent’. So even if Wittgenstein had some familiarity with Husserl’s phenomenology, perhaps through discussions with Moritz Schlick who was familiar with (though very critical of) some of Husserl’s work, Wittgenstein does not appear to have been interested in the characteristic phenomenological method of inquiry. Instead for a time he seems to have used the term ‘phenomenology’ to describe an inquiry into the conditions of linguistic representation which would avoid the problems arising from his exclusive reliance in the Tractatus on logical analysis (hence the reference to ‘grammar’, and not ‘logic’, in the second passage above). 13 There is some overlap between the topics which Merleau-Ponty deals with as cases of ‘motivation’ and the points Wittgenstein discusses as ‘seeing an aspect’ in Philosophical Investigations part II xi. But Wittgenstein seems more concerned to characterise the ways in which seeing is a ‘tangled’ matter (PI II 200e) than to develop anything comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenological motivation. 14 Russell suggests (1912: 70) that this distinction is manifested in French by the distinction between ‘savoir’ and ‘connâitre’. But Merleau-Ponty’s use of these verbs does not follow this rule: he uses ‘ savoir’ for both the kinds of knowledge of the body mentioned above ( PhP 213), and elsewhere uses ‘ connâitre’ both for objective, thetic, knowledge of the world (PhP lxxxii) and for the non-thetic originary knowledge of things inherent in perception ( PhP 45). Indeed, if there is any significance to the ways in which Merleau-Ponty uses ‘ savoir’ and ‘connâitre’, I have not been able to identify it. 15 This remark comes from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, part VI, which is dated ‘c. 1943/1944’. 16 One might suggest that there is another strand of Wittgenstein’s rule-following discussion which offers a potential connection with Merleau-Ponty’s position, namely the thesis cited earlier that ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly’ (PI I §219). For, one might propose, ‘blind’ rule-following can be understood to involve a pre-predicative understanding of the world that grounds the exercise of predicative judgment. This proposal, however, rests on a misunderstanding: Wittgenstein’s thesis concerns judgment; ‘blind’ rule-following is making a judgment in a situation in which there is no conclusive guidance to be followed (and the generality of the thesis comes from the claim that all situations are of this kind). So there is nothing pre-predicative about ‘blind’ rule-following. 17 It is notable that Moore’s common-sense truisms are subjective in this sense. 18 cf. D. Wiggins ‘Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life’ in Wiggins (1987); esp. 107. 19 I examine this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s position in Baldwin (2013). 20 I revert here to Colin Smith’s translation of ‘sens’ as ‘meaning’, since Landes’s translation ‘condemned to sense’ makes little sense. 21 ‘Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes/ Sont le défaut de ton grand diamant’ from ‘Le cimetière marin’ by Paul Valéry. 22 cf. M. Dummett ‘The Reality of the Past’, in Dummett (1978); esp. 362–3. 23 A classic instance is T. H. Green’s single ‘eternally complete consciousness’; see Green (1890: 72ff). 24 It is here that he alludes in a note to Husserl’s Urdoxa, which I discussed earlier. 25 The classic text here is Laing and Esterson (1964). 26 It is worth noting that the passages quoted in note 11 from Wittgenstein’s 1930 Philosophical Remarks start out with precisely the question of recognising ‘what is essential and what inessential in our language if it is to represent’. It is that question which he come to reject as misconceived during the 1930s.
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References Baldwin, T. 2013. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological critique of natural science. In H. Carel and D. Meacham (eds.), Phenomenology and Naturalism (Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement 72). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–219. Dummett, M. 1978. Truth and other Enigmas. London: Duckworth. Foucault, M. 1961. Folie et Déraison. Paris: Gallimard. Green, T. H. 1890. Prolegomena to Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Husserl, E. 1973. Experience and Judgment . Edited by L. Landgrebe, Translated by J. Churchill and K. Ameriks. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. 1982. Ideas I . Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A. 1964. Reason, Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin. Malcolm, N. 1949. Defending common sense. Philosophical Review 58: 201–220. Malcolm, N. 1977. Moore and Wittgenstein on the sense of ‘I know’. In his Thought and Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 170–179. Moore, G. E. 1993. Selected Writings. Edited by T. Baldwin. London: Routledge. Russell, B. 1912. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Williams and Norgate. Russell, B. 1935. The limits of Empiricism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 36: 131–150. Wiggins, D. 1987. Needs, Values and Truth. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Contributors
Thomas Baldwin is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of York. From 2005 until 2015 he was editor of the UK’s leading philosophy journal, Mind . Recent work includes forthcoming papers about Russell on truth and on modality. Chantal Bax is an NWO Veni researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen. In her dissertation, which was awarded the Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize and has been published by Continuum under the title Sub jectivity after Wittgenstein, she placed Wittgenstein’s later work in the context of the continental debate about the so-called death of man. She is currently working on a project about Levinas, Nancy, and the rethinking of community. Taylor Carman is the author of Heidegger’s Analytic (2003) and MerleauPonty (2008; 2nd edition forthcoming) and has coedited The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (2005). He has published articles on a number of topics in phenomenology and is currently writing a book on Heidegger. David R. Cerbone is professor of philosophy at West Virginia University. He is the author of Understanding Phenomenology, Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed , and Existentialism: All That Matters, as well as numerous articles on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the phenomenological tradition. Kathleen Lennon is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hull, UK. Her recent publications include the 2015 monograph, Imagination and the Imaginary (Routledge). She is also co-editor of the 2012 collection Embodied Selves (Palgrave). Kathleen has published numerous articles on topics including: the imagination, the philosophy of embodiment, phenomenology, gender theory, and old age. Katherine J. Morris is a fellow in philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, UK. Her books include Descartes’ Dualism (with Gordon Baker, Routledge, 1996), Sartre (Blackwell Great Minds series, 2008), and Starting with Merleau-Ponty (Continuum Starting With series, 2012), and
176 Contributors she has published widely on Descartes, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and MerleauPonty. She also co-edits the series International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry for Oxford University Press.
Søren Overgaard is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. His main research topics are perception, social cognition, and philosophical methodology. He is the author of Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (2004) and Wittgenstein and Other Minds (2007), co-author of An Introduction to Metaphilosophy (2013), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology (forthcoming). Komarine Romdenh-Romluc is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of the Routledge GuideBook to Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception (2011). She has also published articles on various aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and other issues at the intersection of phenomenology and the philosophy of mind.
Index
ambiguity 76–7, 130–1, 136 analytical attitude 16, 18–20, 22 anonymity 72, 75 art 4, 22, 41–5, 101–2, 104–12; see also painting; pictures aspect-seeing see seeing-as background 2–5, 9, 13, 19–20, 22, 33–4, 40–2, 44, 69–70, 72–3, 108, 117, 123–6, 143, 150 behaviour 1–2, 4, 8–9, 35–6, 49–51, 53–4, 57–62, 72, 96–7, 109–12, 127, 129 behaviourism 12, 28, 63 body, the 2–9, 17–20, 23, 26, 32–3, 36, 38–9, 41–2, 45, 57, 68, 82, 85–6, 88–97, 101, 109–11, 123, 129–30, 139–40, 147, 152, 158, 162–3, 165, 167; body schema 7, 28, 91, 94–7, 109–10; corporeality 71; embodiment 72, 91, 117, 143, 163–4 Brentano, Franz 132–3 causation 3, 5–6, 18–19, 21, 23, 26, 74, 141, 147, 151, 161 certainties 5–6, 9, 68–72, 77–8, 137–9, 143, 151, 161, 170 children 5, 10, 37, 51, 67, 69–70, 80, 104–5, 124, 169 communism 73–5, 77; class consciousness 6, 73–5 culture 26–7, 31, 34, 44, 59, 71, 104, 141, 169
epoché 139, 144; see also phenomenological reduction expression 3–4, 7–9, 24, 31–46, 53–4, 56–7, 59–61, 76, 84, 107–12, 115, 127–30, 162 family resemblance 118–19, 127 flesh 101 freedom 66–7, 71–6, 123, 131 Gallagher, Shaun 4–5, 49–57, 59, 61–2 Gelb, Adhémar, and Goldstein, Kurt 167–8 geometry 40, 148 Gestalt 2–4, 11–27, 31, 33, 35–6, 39, 42, 44, 46, 53; Gestalt psychology 2–3, 11–27, 147 gesture 3–5, 15, 17, 21, 31–3, 35–40, 42–5 Goodman, Nelson 104–5 habit 24–5, 95–6, 112, 157–8, 167; see also skill hands touching 92–3, 95 Heidegger, Martin 32, 41, 45, 66 hinge propositions 5, 9, 137–8, 143, 149, 167; see also certainties history 27, 53, 74–7, 111, 145–7, 149 horizon 74, 111, 123, 138, 142–3, 148, 164, 168 Husserl, Edmund 11, 76, 85, 123, 147–50, 155–6, 163–4
Descartes, Réne 87, 100, 103–4
indeterminacy 8–9, 77, 114–33, 154 intentional arc 167
eidetic reduction 85 emotion 31–3, 37–8, 41, 49–50, 53, 55–61, 87, 94, 112, 127
know-how 154 Köhler, Wolfgang 2–3, 11–12, 14–18, 21–2, 27
