(PDF) The Meontic and the Militant: On Merleau-Ponty's Relation to Fink

This paper clarifies the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation with regard to ‘the idea of a transcendental theory of method’. Although Fink’s text played a singularly important role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, contrary to recent claims made by Ronald Bruzina this influence was not positive. Reconstructing the basic methodological claims of each text, in particular with regard to the being of the phenomenologist, the nature of the productivity that makes phenomenology possible, and the problem of methodological self-reference, I show that Phenomenology of Perception is premised on a decisive rejection of the main theses affirmed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. In contrast to Fink’s speculative reinterpretation of phenomenology as an absolute science, Merleau-Ponty viewed it as participating in the historical realization of the world, and hence as ultimately based on a practical faith. Albeit with a Marxian inflection, Merleau-Ponty thus related phenomenology much more closely to Kant. This may not be a better philosophical position, but circa 1945 it was Merleau-Ponty’s, whose work must be approached accordingly.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 19(5), 669–699 The Meontic and the Militant: On Merleau-Ponty’s Relation to Fink Bryan Smyth Abstract This paper clarifies the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation with regard to ‘the idea of a transcendental theory of method’. Although Fink’s text played a singularly important role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, contrary to recent claims made by Ronald Bruzina this influence was not positive. Reconstructing the basic methodological claims of each text, in particular with regard to the being of the phenomenologist, the nature of the productivity that makes phenomenology possible, and the problem of methodological self-reference, I show that Phenomenology of Perception is premised on a decisive rejection of the main theses affirmed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. In contrast to Fink’s speculative reinterpretation of phenomenology as an absolute science, Merleau-Ponty viewed it as participating in the historical realization of the world, and hence as ultimately based on a practical faith. Albeit with a Marxian inflection, Merleau-Ponty thus related phenomenology much more closely to Kant. This may not be a better philosophical position, but circa 1945 it was Merleau-Ponty’s, whose work must be approached accordingly. Keywords: Merleau-Ponty; Fink; phenomenology; transcendental; method; Kant There can be no doubt that the understanding of Husserlian phenomenology undergirding Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was significantly informed by works written by Eugen Fink in the 1930s.1 This connection has been noted by a number of commentators over the years (e.g. Geraets, 1971, Toadvine, 2002). However, by far the most thorough treatment is that recently offered by Ronald Bruzina (2002: p. 173) in which he argues that by the end of the 1930s there was a ‘remarkable continuity and coherence’ between the views held by Fink and Merleau-Ponty concerning the fundamental meaning and nature of phenomenology. In fact, Bruzina claims that Merleau-Ponty’s thought converged so closely with Fink’s that Phenomenology of Perception ‘incorporate[d] Fink’s meta-theoretical understanding of phenomenol- International Journal of Philosophical Studies ISSN 0967-2559 print 1466-4542 online Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2011.600771 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES ogy’, that is, Fink’s ‘meta-understanding [. . .] of the “system” of phenomenological inquiry’ (2002, pp. 187–8).2 These references to a meta-level understanding point to the critique of phenomenological method contained in Fink’s then-unpublished Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Bruzina, 2002: pp. 185–6) a text that Merleau-Ponty was able to read in 1942.3 It has always been known that MerleauPonty had read this monograph, as he explicitly cited it three times in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, including on the very first page. But as it was not published until 1988, it was never established as a point of reference in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. Nonetheless, despite the short shrift that it has received in the literature, the impact that the Sixth Cartesian Meditation had on Merleau-Ponty’s thought at the time of writing Phenomenology of Perception was singularly important.4 For his encounter with ‘the idea of a transcendental theory of method’ outlined in this text was the pivotal moment on the philosophical trajectory through which he overcame the methodological impasse with which The Structure of Behavior concluded, to arrive at the completed form of Phenomenology of Perception. Failure to take Fink’s work into account leaves a major lacuna in our understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus – and by extension seriously infirms our understanding of the subsequent development of his thought overall. However, notwithstanding some important affinities to which it draws attention, there is something profoundly misleading in Bruzina’s claim that Phenomenology of Perception ‘incorporates’ or otherwise exhibits ‘remarkable continuity and coherence’ with the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. For this conceals what is innovative in Merleau-Ponty’s work. It is crucial to recognize that Merleau-Ponty’s decisive turn to Husserlian phenomenology was based on an original methodological reinterpretation, rather than on one appropriated from Fink. Indeed, this reinterpretation hinged on the decisive rejection of the main theses affirmed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. As comparative textual analysis will show, in virtue of Merleau-Ponty’s radically existential orientation, the affinities that do obtain between Phenomenology of Perception and the Sixth Cartesian Meditation are formal rather than substantive. The result is that Merleau-Ponty’s own meta-understanding of phenomenology – concerning, for example, the being of the phenomenologist, the nature of the ‘productivity’ that makes phenomenology possible, and (most importantly) the problem of methodological self-reference, i.e., the phenomenology of phenomenology that alone would legitimate the project philosophically – diverges dramatically from Fink’s position.5 To be sure, Merleau-Ponty always had considerable respect for Fink as a philosopher.6 And it may be the case that his subsequent philosophical work served to narrow the gap that Phenomenology of Perception opened up between them. But in order soundly to make this or, indeed, 670 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT any judgment about the development of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it is imperative that we first come to terms with the precise nature of his initial response to the methodological issues raised by Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation.7 Such is what this paper proposes to do. To this end, I will first unpack Fink’s dense and technical text in terms of the problem of phenomenological self-reference (§1). Beginning with his account of the phenomenologist as a detached ‘onlooker’ [Zuschauer] that does not participate in the constitution of the world, I show how this leads to a problem of transcendental ‘illusion’ [Schein] that is only overcome by interpreting phenomenology as an ‘absolute science’ based on a speculative account of its productivity. I then reconstruct the essential outlines of Merleau-Ponty’s critical response (§2).8 This will show that by foregrounding the corporeality of the phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty’s view embeds phenomenology and its productivity within the very participation that Fink excludes. The result is that phenomenological self-reference is only achieved only through a positive embrace of transcendental illusion that necessarily involves an irreducible element of faith, something that is anathema to the account developed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. By way of conclusion (§3) I will briefly consider the divergence between Merleau-Ponty and Fink in terms of transcendental phenomenology’s relation to Kant – the question as to whether its proper aim is to complete or rather surpass the ‘Copernican Revolution’ (cf. Kersten 1995, Crowell 2001). Here I will suggest that whereas Fink’s speculative interpretation of phenomenology positions it as a project of theoretical reason designed to surpass the limitations of Kantian critique by obviating recourse to any sort of faith, Merleau-Ponty’s existential interpretation implicates phenomenology as a project of practical reason, and this in a way that positions it as an attempt – albeit a radical one – to complete the project of transcendental critique. 1. The Meontic: Fink and the Idea of Constructive Phenomenology This section provides an outline of the central methodological idea of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. It does this by showing how the construal of the phenomenologist as a theoretical onlooker (§1.1) gives rise to a specific problem of transcendental illusion (§1.2) and how this requires for its resolution a speculative interpretation of phenomenology as the ‘absolute science’ of the constitution of worldly Being [Sein] in terms of processes obtaining in the extra-worldly dimension of ‘pre-Being’ [Vor-Sein] (§1.3).9 1.1. The Phenomenological Onlooker Fink wrote the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as part of the project of systematically reworking the (five) Cartesian Meditations which Husserl had 671 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES come to regard as still beholden to a certain transcendental naı̈veté.10 Fink’s proposed revisions to the original Meditations cut strongly against their ‘Cartesian’ character, in particular by insisting upon the pregivenness of the world as phenomenology’s initial situation, and emphasizing that, just as much as it encompasses transcendent being, the world includes the sphere of human immanence. To deflect the common but mistaken view that performing the phenomenological reduction entails withdrawing into an inner domain of apodictic self-certainty, Fink locks human existence within the mundane world by circumscribing it ontologically, that is, by interpreting the ‘natural attitude’ as a necessary transcendental fact of human existence. Rather than as any kind of psychological complex within the world, it is a matter of the constant world-apperception that is essentially constitutive of human experience. For Fink, world-belief is ‘the primal happening [Urgeschehen] of our transcendental existence’ (Fink, 1988b: p. 187) such that ‘existing-withinthe-belief-in-the-world and believing oneself to be human are one and the same’ [Im-Weltglauben-sein und im Selbstglauben als Mensch sein sind untrennbar eins] (KS, p. 115/109). Hence, rather than as the ‘natural attitude’, Fink preferred to denote the mundane predicament of human existence as Weltbefangenheit, captivation in/by the world (see Bruzina, 1998: pp. 57–60, cf. Cairns, 1976: p. 95). Human beings as such are imprisoned by ontic preoccupations. Although familiar with the disagreements between Husserl and Heidegger over the being of transcendental and mundane subjectivity, in thus posing the ‘question of being’ Fink was not following Heidegger (cf. Bernet, 1989). For he rejects the ‘ontological priority’ of Dasein. Instead, his move is to rethink Husserl’s project on the basis of a sharper ontological difference between mundane and transcendental subjectivity, construing the former as the latter’s worldly self-apperception, i.e., as the constituted product of extramundane constitution. For Fink, ‘the existent is only the result of a constitution’, and ‘constitution is always constitution of the existent’ (SCM, p. 23/21; cf. p. 108/99). Key here is that the constitutive coming-to-be of an existent is not itself an existent (SCM, p. 82/ 73) and thus cannot be understood in terms of worldly ontology. Fink argued that, pending a special reduction of it, our idea of being pertains exclusively to constituted objectivity of the natural attitude – hence the transcendental naı̈veté of the original Meditations (cf. SCM, pp. 78–84/ 70–5). As constitutive origination and becoming of the world, what we would call transcendental being ‘is’ ‘simply and solely in the process’ (SCM, p. 49/45; cf. p. 107/97). Fink denotes this constitutive process as ‘enworlding’ [Verweltlichung], or more precisely, as primary or proper [eigentliche] enworlding (SCM, p. 108/99; cf. p. 23/21). And he refers to its ‘being-mode’, which transcends the mundane idea of being, as 672 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT ‘“pre-being”’ [‘Vor-Sein’]. Initially, at any rate, this is the central object of phenomenological investigation. Radicalizing phenomenology’s basic problematic in this way, however, it follows for Fink that, as weltbefangen entities, human beings are constitutively incapable of effecting the epoché, performing the reduction, and of carrying out the phenomenological investigation of primary enworlding. This could only occur outside the world; hence, the proper agency of phenomenological reflection must have transcendental status. Yet at the same time this agency must be separate from, i.e., not participate in, the process that it is supposed to investigate. Consequently, in tandem with the ontological difference between mundane and transcendental, Fink further posits a radical splitting [Spaltung] within transcendental being.11 This splitting is the epoché, a ‘structural moment of transcendental reflection’ (KS, p. 121/115) whereby transcendental life ‘steps outside itself’, producing the ‘non-participant’ [unbeteiligte] ‘phenomenological onlooker’ (SCM, p. 26/23; cf. Fink, 1998b: p. 187). The result is an antithetical duality at the transcendental level whereby the onlooker breaks with the ‘innermost vital tendency’ of transcendental life (SCM, p. 12/12) viz., the constitutive realization of the world, setting up a countertendency to it (SCM, p. 26/24). As this countertendency, the onlooker’s phenomenologizing is the becoming-for-itself of transcendentally constituting life. Fink describes the resulting dynamic in dialectical terms: ‘Thus split, transcendental life turns upon itself, becomes objective to itself, and comes back to itself in thematic self-elucidation’ (Fink, 1988b: p. 187; cf. SCM, p. 163/147).12 Fink does not deny that the reduction is played out at the mundane level. But he insists that as ‘a theoretical self-surmounting [Selbstüberwindung] of man’ (KS, p. 134/126) the action it implies cannot be understood in worldly terms. For the reduction ‘de-objectifies, de-worlds intentional life by removing the self-apperceptions that enworld it, that situate it in the world’, rendering wholly immanent the ‘depths of the intentional life of belief where the psychical life’s self-apperception is first validly constructed’ (KS, p. 142/133). While a human subject may undergo such an experience, she is not the active reducing subject per se. Rather, the active element can only be the onlooker, the transcendental subject’s tendency toward self-consciousness as it may happen to ‘awaken’ in her. It is not any kind of human self-reflection, but rather transcendental subjectivity, ‘concealed in self-objectivation as man, reflectively think[ing] about itself’ (SCM, p. 36/32). In fact, on account of how he poses the basic problem of phenomenology, Fink is committed not only to denying that the reduction cannot be independently motivated in the natural attitude,13 but moreover that ‘phenomenologizing is not a human possibility at all, but signifies precisely the un-humanizing [Entmenschung] of man, the passing of human existence [. . .] into 673 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES the transcendental subject’ (SCM, p. 132/120; cf. pp. 36, 43–4/32, 40; KS, p. 110/104). That the agent of phenomenology must be the non-participating transcendental onlooker is the guiding idea in Fink’s attempt to redress the transcendental naı̈veté of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. But what is also required is a ‘self-objectification’ [Selbstvergegenständlichung] of the onlooker (SCM, p. 14/13), a self-referential thematization of its phenomenologizing (SCM, p. 25/23), lacking which a new naı̈veté would simply replace the old. For even if, through the onlooker’s phenomenologizing, primary enworlding gains self-consciousness, the being of the onlooker itself remains a mystery. As Fink put it: ‘In the field of “transcendentality” there remains [. . .] something still uncomprehended, precisely the phenomenological theorizing “onlooker”’ (SCM, p. 13/12; cf. pp. 24–5/ 22–3). This is the focus of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as a work of methodology. Taking up Husserl’s own directive that transcendental phenomenology subject itself to rigorous methodological self-critique (Husserl, 1969: p. 289, 1960: pp. 29, 151f; cf. Luft, 2002: pp. 8–22), Fink’s aim is to clarify how the transcendental experience of the phenomenological onlooker could gain a complete self-conscious comprehension of its own activity and thereby establish itself scientifically. Phenomenological methodology is ‘the phenomenological science of phenomenologizing, the phenomenology of phenomenology’ (SCM, p. 13/12) in the sense of ‘submit[ting] the phenomenologizing thought and theory-formation that functions anonymously in phenomenological labors to a proper transcendental analytic, and thus to complete phenomenology in ultimate transcendental self-understanding about itself’ (SCM, pp. 8–9/9). 1.2. The Problem of Transcendental Illusion The view of transcendental phenomenology presented in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation conspicuously reflects the structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in a number of ways. For example, Fink distinguished the transcendental theory of method, as the dimension of phenomenology that thematizes itself, from what he called the ‘transcendental theory of elements’, the dimension of phenomenology that thematizes transcendental subjectivity as primary enworlding. While initially the latter may be the central object of phenomenological investigation, it would be wrong to regard that as phenomenology proper, something to which the theory of method would be a sort of appendix (as many readers of Kant’s first Critique mistakenly regard his theory of method).14 Rather, Fink’s account of the phenomenological investigation of primary enworlding shows that its scientificity depends crucially on what the theory of method offers – in particular, on what he called, again echoing Kant, the ‘canon of phenomenological reason’.15 For while the ontological status 674 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT of the onlooker makes transcendental cognition possible, it also presents phenomenology with certain paradoxes, such that its quest for transcendental truth is congenitally susceptible (here we hear Kant again) to ‘transcendental illusion’. For Kant this has to do with certain rationally necessary transcendental fictions which, if applied theoretically beyond the scope of experience, give rise to the dialectical fallacies of dogmatic metaphysics, but which are not necessarily deceptive (KrV, A645/B673) as they possess indispensable heuristic value when employed regulatively (cf. Grier, 2001: pp. 268–288). In contrast, for Fink transcendental illusion is not something that bears directly upon transcendental insight at all, but is a problem having to do with how transcendental truth appears, that is, with the fact that it can only appear in mundane form as ‘appearance-truth’ [Erscheinungswahrheit] or ‘seeming truth’ [Scheinwahrheit].16 So whereas for Kant there can be no canon of pure theoretical reason – there is a negative discipline for that, while he strictly limits the positive canon to reason’s practical use (KrV, A797/B825), as conceived by Fink the canon of phenomenological reason is precisely that which enables us to distinguish between ‘mere appearance-truths’ and ‘proper transcendental truths’ with respect to phenomenologizing (SCM, pp. 111, 120f, 129f, 134/101, 110, 118, 121). We can distinguish two levels within phenomenology’s problem of transcendental illusion. First, there is the matter of communicating transcendental truth – how it appears to others. (Fink’s Kant-Studien article is mainly limited to this level of the problem.) The issue here is that phenomenology faces profound, paradoxical difficulties when it tries to express its transcendental insights within the weltbefangen conceptual confines of ordinary language and formal logic (KS, p. 153/142; cf. pp. 155, 80/145, 75). However, strictly speaking that is not a problem within phenomenology. Rather, it is a matter of others’ limited understanding – a symptom of the growing pains of phenomenology at an early stage of its development.17 But the problem of transcendental illusion is not limited to the difficulties attaching to the communication of phenomenological truth. There is a deeper level to the problem, (upon which Fink deliberately held back from elaborating in his Kant-Studien article) – namely, how transcendental truth appears at all (KS, p. 153/142). For in Fink’s account, phenomenology is separate from enworlding. How then does it appear? How is it that phenomenology ‘un-performs’ the reduction, as it were – how does it effect an un-un-humanizing – so as to avoid being stranded in transcendence? The second level of the problem of transcendental illusion takes us inside phenomenology. There are two aspects to consider. First, there is the nature of transcendental cognition itself. In a sense, illusion obtains here germinally. For the onlooker’s experience of enworlding necessarily 675 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES involves a ‘transcendental ontification’. That is, it necessarily reproduces the framework of mundane ontology at the ‘pre-existent’ level (SCM, p. 83/74). ‘[T]he theoretical experience of the phenomenological onlooker ontifies the “pre-existent” life-processes of transcendental subjectivity and is therefore in a sense – a sense not comparable to any mode of productivity pregiven in a worldly way – “productive”’ (SCM, pp. 85f/76). But because this ‘productivity’ transpires at the level of apperception presupposed by any mundane experience, there is no ‘appearing’ and therefore there is no deception – this is just the form that transcendental insight must take. And this will become progressively more suitable as the reduction of the idea of being that is required to properly understand primary enworlding gets worked out philosophically. It is just that this process starts in the natural attitude. The natural attitude, however, ‘is not only the wherefrom [Wo-vonaus] but also the whither [Wo-für]’ of phenomenology (SCM, p. 109/99). Even if transcendental cognition is veridical in the ‘pre-existent’ realm, what ultimately matters is how it surfaces in the natural attitude (SCM p. 109/99). The second – and more important – aspect of how phenomenology appears lies in what Fink called ‘secondary’ or ‘non-proper’ [uneigentliche] enworlding, by which he denotes ‘the summation of the constitutive process which places phenomenologizing itself into the world’ (SCM, p. 108/99; cf. pp. 120, 142/110, 129). This is labeled ‘secondary’, since it is the enworlding of the transcendental cognition of primary enworlding. But it is deemed ‘non-proper’ because – significantly – it is a process with respect to which the onlooker is passive – it is a ‘being taken along’ (SCM, p. 127/116; cf. p. 125/113) that ‘does not rest upon its own activity’ (SCM, p. 119/109).18 Herein lies the real problem of transcendental illusion. Secondary enworlding results from what Fink describes as a ‘self-concealment, a self-apperceptive constitution lying back over constituting life’ (SCM, p. 120/109). He does not spell this out (SCM, p. 120/110) but his point is that the transcendental acts of sense-bestowal in virtue of which a phenomenological cognition appears necessarily exceed its scope. Any rigorous science must grasp its own functioning, and so this situation is potentially devastating for phenomenology. Unlike primary enworlding, the transcendental origins of which remain ‘anonymous’ and are ‘forgotten’, secondary enworlding is ‘precisely the worldly objectivation of knowing about transcendental origin’, including its own (SCM, p. 128/116, emphasis added). This must be the case not only with the transcendental ‘ontification’ inherent in its (proper) phenomenological cognition, but also the mundane ontification brought about by its (non-proper) enworlding. The latter must therefore involve a twofold transparency with respect to transcendental constitutive essence: ‘transparency with respect to the transcendental process of phenomenologi676 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT zing’, and ‘transparency in the “appearance” with respect to the constitutional processes that fashion that “appearance”’ (SCM, p. 128/117). This is crucial. For this twofold transparency announces nothing less than the canon of phenomenological reason. As Fink put it (envisioning phenomenology at a more advanced stage): This twofold transparency provides the phenomenological cognizer with the possibility of forming at any time an insight-based judgment regarding that which is only a truth with respect to worldly appearance, and that which is a truth that forms the proper transcendental essence of phenomenologizing. (SCM, p. 128/117). Nothing more is required to overcome the transcendental illusion of ‘seeming truth’ – not to abolish it, since that is not possible, but rather to ensure that it is not deceptive. For inasmuch as we have gained this twofold transparency with respect to it, ‘seeming truth is itself “sublated” [‘aufgehoben’] in transcendental truth’ (SCM, p. 147/134). This means that the onlooker’s self-understanding preserves the appearance-truths of phenomenologizing by accounting for their mundane one-sidedness in terms of transcendental truth. All distinctions between apparent and genuine truth made on the basis of the canon of phenomenological reason would be characterized by this sort of dialectical Aufhebung (SCM, pp. 129–30/118). This points to Fink’s notion of the Absolute. To get to that, we need but ask: Granting the first, how is that second transparency possible? The answer lies in Fink’s account of ‘constructive phenomenology’. According to Fink, phenomenology cannot limit its theoretical activity to regressive analysis of primary enworlding. This is because the onlooker cannot limit the scope of its investigation to the ‘“internal horizon of constituting life”’ – which amounts to saying that it cannot adhere to Husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’ (1982: §24). For regressive analysis of certain elements of the reductively given phenomenon of the world – for example, birth and death, psychological development, intersubjective relations, and world history – will necessarily founder, inasmuch as such phenomena prompt the onlooker to seek the transcendental sense of various forms of totality (SCM, p. 71/63; cf. p. 12/11). But as transcendental constitution is always already unfolding within them, these totalities as such are not given (SCM, pp. 69–70/62). This motivates a ‘movement out beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life’ to an examination of what Fink calls its ‘“external horizon”’ (SCM, p. 7/7). The resulting investigation, insofar as it ‘abandons the basis of transcendental “givenness,” no longer exhibits things intuitively, but necessarily proceeds’, as Fink put it, ‘constructively’ (SCM, p. 7/7). 677 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES Thus, it is not just that phenomenology is hampered by the difficulty of having an object that is non-existent, and thus mundanely inexpressible. It is also the case that its object as a whole is non-given, and thus even transcendentally unintuitable. Thus, in keeping with the structural echo of Kant’s first Critique, Fink characterizes constructive phenomenology as ‘transcendental dialectic’. For there is, he claims, a ‘material [sachliche] affinity’ here, in that both deal with ‘the basic problem of the relation of the “given” to the “non-given”’ (SCM, p. 71/64). But with respect to transcendental knowledge there is a profound difference. For Fink’s construction is precisely meant to enable reason to go beyond the merely regulative role assigned to it by Kant, by granting it cognitive access to objects that are in principle non-given. Although it belongs to one of the more provisional parts of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink’s claim that regressive inquiry is inadequate to fulfill the aims of phenomenology, which is consequently required to pursue constructive inquiry – his calling into question ‘the intuitional character of phenomenological cognition itself’ (SCM, p. 29/ 26) – is certainly one of the most striking features of the work. At first blush, it might seem to be a phenomenological non-starter. But recall the problem of secondary enworlding: if it is the case that transcendental life is composed exclusively of constituting and phenomenologizing activity, then it follows that the constitutive processes of secondary enworlding – which as such are, in principle, non-given – belong to the ‘external horizon’ of reductive givenness, and that the transparency the onlooker gains with respect to them – and hence its own being – must be achieved through phenomenological construction. This is consistent with the ‘“precedence”’ [‘Vorhergehen’] of the onlooker that distinguishes constructive from regressive phenomenology (SCM, pp. 72–3/ 65–6) and with the centrality of secondary enworlding to the ‘coincidence in Existence [Existenzdeckung] between the transcendental subject and its enworlded self-objectivation’—inquiry concerning which Fink explicitly placed in the province of constructive phenomenology (SCM, p. 71/64). We thus have the following: (1) the naı̈veté that the account of the transcendental onlooker is meant to overcome is transposed into the problem of the transparency of secondary enworlding. That is, that naı̈veté is solved by going outside the world, thus introducing the new problem of understanding how phenomenological cognition gets (back) into the world. (2) Fink’s solution to this problem would necessarily be ‘constructive’. (3) Constructive phenomenology thus plays a key role in arriving at the canon of phenomenological reason. But how would this be carried out non-arbitrarily in advance of the canonical distinction? Fink admittedly cannot shed much light on this. But we can glimpse 678 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT where he was heading from his portrayal of phenomenology as ‘absolute science’. 1.3. Phenomenology as ‘Absolute Science’ Fink’s basic claim is that transcendental insights gained through the phenomenological reduction can be established scientifically only if the problem of transcendental illusion with respect to secondary enworlding is constructively overcome. A coherent system of phenomenological reason must be underpinned by a self-consciousness that comprehends completely the productive force of the project. The problem, however, is that the canonical distinction required for this constructive process can only come about through it. This circularity is redolent of the ‘dilemma of the criterion’ attributed to Sextus Empiricus, and Fink proceeds in a way that situates phenomenology in close proximity to the speculative tradition of post-Kantian German Idealism, Hegel in particular.19 He does this by approaching secondary enworlding in terms of the complex ‘identity’ of the phenomenologizing with the human and constituting ‘egos’ (KS, p. 123/116; cf. SCM, p. 43/39) – within which, he noted, lie concealed ‘the most basic insights into the architectonic of the phenomenological system’ (KS, p. 123/116; cf. SCM, pp. 45-6/42). How is this ‘identity’ to be understood? Fink answered this question in terms of the Absolute, understood as the inclusive, synthetic unity of the different moments of the performance structure of the reduction. Fink’s Absolute thus straddles the boundary of worldly ontology: ‘the Absolute is not [. . .] a homogeneous universal unity of that which is existent [. . .], but precisely the comprehensive unity of the existent as such and the pre-existent’ (SCM, p. 157/ 143). Since it thus includes being as a moment, this unity itself is beyond being. Fink thus characterized the Absolute as meontic – a notion that occupied a central place in Fink’s thought during the period in question (Bruzina, 1995: lv–lvii; 2004: 366f). The unity of the Absolute can be thought of as joining world-constitution with both its being-for-itself (the onlooker as a moment of knowing) and with its self-apperceiving end-product (human being as a moment of believing). For there is an important sense even here – or especially, since world-constitution is teleologically directed at the world – in which knowledge implies belief. Yet that is something the onlooker lacks. This is why the style of the canon of phenomenological reason is one of dialectical sublation rather than simple supersession of appearance-truth. Transcendental insight is meaningless if not tied to that which it surpasses. Thus, not unlike in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the appearance of phenomenologizing is recognized as a necessary constituent of the project. And the opposition between onlooker and human 679 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES being is now comprehended as a ‘necessary antithesis in the synthetic unity of the Absolute’ (SCM, p. 166/150). The apparent contradiction in phenomenological agency is resolved through its being ‘sublated in the absolute truth that phenomenologizing is in itself a cognitive movement of the Absolute’ (SCM, p. 167/150; cf. p. 129/117–8). From the standpoint of the meontic Absolute, phenomenology can be seen as a ‘transformation [Verwandlung] of the “self”’: the reductive performance ‘doubles’ the human ego by bringing its transcendental ground to self-evidence, and transcendental reflection reunites these at a ‘higher’ level by realizing in self-consciousness the ‘identity’ of the whole (KS, p. 123/117). Thus, the ‘“concrete” concept of the “phenomenologizing subject”’ is the ‘dialectical unity’ of the two ‘antithetic moments’ – that is, ‘transcendental subjectivity “appearing” in the world’ (SCM, p. 127/116; cf. pp. 147, 157, 163/134, 142, 147). As the science of enworlding, phenomenology thus amounts to the theory of the appearance of the Absolute in being. This is, in a sense, the ‘self-cognition’ of the Absolute, and phenomenology is, accordingly, ‘absolute science’ – the absolute self-understanding of the Absolute (SCM, p. 169/152). The problematic circularity of the onlooker’s self-understanding would be worked out within this absolute self-referentiality. The Sixth Cartesian Meditation is short on details, but the idea is that all metaphysical questions are answerable, and that transcendental illusion can, in principle, be fully mastered theoretically in a new dimension of transcendental philosophy which, surpassing intuitional givenness, would grasp the constitutedness of human worldly finitude on the basis of a speculative sort of ‘intellectual intuition’,20 ‘thereby taking it back into the infinite essence of spirit’ (KS, p. 155/144-5). Such is what the Sixth Cartesian Meditation anticipates as the only methodologically coherent form of phenomenology, and Fink glosses it as ‘a meontic philosophy of absolute spirit’ (SCM, p. 183/1). 2. The Militant: Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Response to Fink This section outlines the methodological sense of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar position as a critical response to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation.21 I approach this by way of Merleau-Ponty’s own account of the phenomenology of phenomenology (§2.1) and his construal of transcendental phenomenology as a human practice based on a concrete understanding of phenomenological productivity (§2.2). I then show how this achieves self-reference only through a positive embrace of transcendental illusion (§2.3). This will make clear the extent to which Phenomenology of Perception is based on a radically different architectonic than the Sixth Cartesian Meditation – specifically, one that sees phenomenology as participating actively in the on-going realization of the world, rather than 680 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT spectating passively upon a transcendental process that is always already determined from the empirical standpoint. 2.1. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Phenomenology When we recall that The Structure of Behavior concluded with the methodological desideratum to ‘define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real’ (SC, p. 241/224, emphasis added), and when we take seriously Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Phenomenology of Perception was ‘only a preliminary study’, the intention of which was to ‘define a method for getting closer to present and living reality’ (PrP, p. 68/25, emphasis added), we can recognize that the latter work was, like the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, ultimately concerned with formulating the idea of a transcendental theory of method. That Phenomenology of Perception was (among other things) a response to Fink’s text is further evinced by the fact that, in contrast to ‘direct description’, Merleau-Ponty refers to Part III as a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology’ (PhP, p. 419/365). This is clearly set off as a distinct methodological project, its point being to use the phenomenological descriptions laid out in Parts I and II as an opportunity ‘for defining a more radical comprehension and reflection than objective thought’ (PhP, p. 419/365, emphasis added). This task of ‘second-order reflection’ is explicitly announced at the end of Part II, but it is prefigured throughout the work, including at the end of the Preface (PhP, xvi/xxi) and at the end of the ‘Introduction’ (PhP, pp. 74–77/61–3). There Merleau-Ponty reminds us that ‘the meditating Ego’ is essentially situated within the perspective of a particular concrete subject, and that radical reflection must take this into account. ‘We must not only adopt a reflective attitude’, therefore, ‘but furthermore reflect on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding and which is therefore part of its definition’ (PhP, p. 75/62). The aim of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phenomenology of phenomenology’ is thus to validate the descriptive account as a philosophical contribution, rather than a mere ‘psychological curiosity’ (PrP, p. 55/19). For on its own, it does not rule out there being a realm of pure thought over and above perception, and hence the possibility of establishing a system of truth capable of disambiguating perceptual experience and resolving its contradictions. In other words, the point is to show the impossibility of an absolute science in Fink’s sense.22 Although he agreed with Fink about the methodological limits of regressive phenomenology, it was not the intuitional but rather the cognitive character of phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty restricted. His interpretation of phenomenology is therefore radically different. Tellingly, he took his bearings, not (like Fink) from the speculative and systematic Hegel, but rather from the young Hegel – whom Merleau-Ponty viewed 681 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES in existential terms and conflated rather freely with Marx (SNS, pp. 109–121/63–70). He thus regarded the emergence of phenomenological philosophy – Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding [Verweltlichung] – as a special case of the emergence of self-conscious historical collectivities in general – which is essentially Marx’s idea of the ‘realization’ [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. Both are matters of transformatively overcoming the silence of a ‘multiple solipsism’ [solipsisme à plusieurs] by establishing ‘effective communication’ between isolated individuals (PhP, p. 412/359; cf. p. 76/62). Merleau-Ponty thus dismissed Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding. For in saying – as he repeatedly did, including at the end of Phenomenology of Perception – that philosophy ‘comes into being by destroying itself as separate philosophy’ (PhP, p. 520/456, emphasis added; cf. SNS, p. 237/133), he embraced the claim that philosophy cannot be realized without being transcended [aufgehoben], that is, without being integrated with reality through transformative praxis (cf. Marx, 1975: pp. 250, 257). In other words, Merleau-Ponty founded the scientificity of phenomenology on the same productivity that makes historical agency in general possible (cf. SNS, p. 229/129). It is thus a praxiological idea of method that Merleau-Ponty developed in response to Fink, a view based on the claim that transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity – a claim upon which he repeatedly insisted23 – and hence that the nexus of concrete intercorporeal praxis is itself the absolute.24 Ultimately, it is this claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology was intended to substantiate. For this is what underlies the method that he was aiming to define, which involves a sort of ‘plunge’ into ‘present and living reality’.25 As he says in no uncertain terms, ‘the solution of all problems of transcendence is to be sought in the thickness of the pre-objective present’ (PhP, p. 495/433). That is, it is here that all philosophical problems will be resolved, insofar as they are legitimately resolvable. This qualification is crucial, for Merleau-Ponty does not maintain that all philosophical problems that can be posed are resoluble. In an important footnote (PhP, p. 419/365) he presents a dilemma with respect to Husserl to the effect that either second-order phenomenological reflection clarifies the world completely, in which case first-order description would be superfluous; or else second-order reflection can at best only remove some but not all obscurities left by description. Inasmuch as it is agreed that phenomenology must begin in the natural attitude, then, first-order description is not superfluous, and we must opt for the latter prong and accept a certain degree of opacity. This has the implication that Merleau-Ponty rejected in principle the possibility of complete theoretical transparency with respect to the enworlding of phenomenology – precisely that for which Fink sought a ‘constructive’ solution. 682 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT This is crucial. The Merleau-Pontian absolute is insuperably ambiguous, yet it is here that the problems of transcendence are to be resolved (PhP, pp. 418–9/364–5). According to Merleau-Ponty, it is precisely the ‘contradictory’ nature of human intercorporeal involvement, our being constituted and (contra Fink) constituting, that enables phenomenological achievements, and so this must not be ontologically written off or sublated away. What we see, then, is that by aiming to ‘rediscover time beneath the subject [and to] relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and others’, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology poses a deflationary argument against Fink. The idea is to dissolve the dilemma of either ‘believing our descriptions’ or ‘knowing what we are talking about’ by showing that, beyond the intercorporeal involvement revealed through descriptive analysis, ‘there is nothing to understand’ (PhP, p. 419/365). Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s account thus leaves no ‘uncomprehended residue’ (cf. SCM, p. 25/23) – none, that is, that could be comprehended theoretically. It thereby upholds Husserl’s contention that phenomenology provides an ‘ultimate understanding of the world’ – an understanding behind which ‘there is nothing more that can be sensefully inquired for, nothing more to understand’ (Husserl 1969: p. 242) – while also obviating the need for constructive phenomenology.26 Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to maintain the intuitional basis of phenomenological insight. But recognizing its essential perspectivity, he decoupled intuition from apodictic truth. This decoupling is tied to his notion of ‘le pre´juge´ du monde’ – the naı̈ve assumption, upon which objective thought is based, that a fully determinate world obtains (PhP, pp. 11, 62, 296, 316/5, 51, 256, 273). For Merleau-Ponty, there is no such world – not yet, anyway – and therefore, no such determinateness is being constituted. As an active intervention into an ‘unfinished world’, phenomenology has no privileged epistemological guarantee. The world and truth are à faire – to be made. For Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical validity of phenomenological claims accrues from their intersubjective appropriation and ratification – prior to which they are, strictly speaking, non-sense (SNS, p. 32/19; PhP, pp. 491, 509/429, 446).27 Even – or especially – in the case of a theoretically detached onlooker. Thus, whereas in Fink’s meontic interpretation phenomenology’s basic methodological problematic is structured in terms of the relation between Sein and Vor-Sein, Merleau-Ponty framed it in entirely human terms, such that ‘the whole question is ultimately one of understanding [. . .] the relation between sense and nonsense’ (PhP, p. 490/428). Consider how Merleau-Ponty glosses the upshot of Phenomenology of Perception. In explicit opposition to Fink, Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘[t]he phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down [fondation] of being’ (PhP, xv/xx, emphasis added). Continuing, he blurred the distinction 683 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES between human being and onlooker: ‘the meditating Ego, the “impartial spectator” do not return to an already given rationality’. Rather – and here Merleau-Ponty quotes Fink slightly out of context28 – ‘they “establish themselves” [s’e´tablissent],29 and establish it [rationality], through an initiative which has no guarantee in being, its right resting entirely on the effective power which it gives us of taking our own history upon ourselves’ (PhP, xvi/xx, emphasis added). As a human endeavor in an unfinished, still-indeterminate world, phenomenology is fittingly dramatic – and dramatically different from Fink’s portrayal of the onlooker’s theoretical experience: We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we stake [engageons] our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act that validates itself in practice [se ve´rifie en s’exerçant]. (PhP, xvi/xx; cf. SC, p. 240/224) 2.2. Phenomenology as a Human Practice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of transcendental phenomenology as a human practice is based upon a view of universal possibilities of selfless engagement and intersubjective communication. 2.2.1. Une acte violent . . . (2.2.1) In the absence of a determinate world, there is no basis for reading Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre´juge´ du monde as bearing any substantive similarity to Fink’s notion of Weltbefangenheit (cf. Bruzina, 2002: p. 194). We are not imprisoned, ontologically or otherwise, in the world. Merleau-Ponty had already shown in The Structure of Behavior that the nature of human existence is to project itself beyond given situations, that it fundamentally involves an orientation to the possible, even if this lies ‘beyond the world’ – indeed, ‘beyond any milieu’ (SC, pp. 189–90/ 175–6, 245n97, emphasis added). Thus, whereas for Fink Weltbefangenheit is a necessary condition of human existence, for Merleau-Ponty it could at most be taken as describing the natural attitude in normal cases. Nor did Merleau-Ponty agree with Fink’s claim that the phenomenological reduction represents the first breakthrough (SCM, p. 124/113). Rather, it is precisely the capacity of going ‘beyond any milieu’ exhibited by certain forms of non-phenomenological activity that phenomenology itself relies on. Interestingly, what these have in common is a certain structural (but not etiological) filiation with schizophrenia. Concerning phenomenology, therefore, whereas Fink posited a Ich-Spaltung (splitting of the I) at the transcendental level,30 Merleau-Ponty held that such 684 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT is precisely what can and must occur in the concrete. Hence his claim, for example, that ‘the highest form of reason borders on madness [de´raison]’ (SNS, p. 9/4; cf. p. 121/70). This is why Merleau-Ponty describes the phenomenological reduction – the suspension of le pre´juge´ du monde – as a venturesome staking of one’s life. It requires the capacity for a kind of selfless engagement which, not unlike death, imposes distance from vital egoic particularity in the direction of human universality (SNS, pp. 115–7/67). This is the standpoint of ‘the living subject, man as productivity’ (PhP, p. 171/200, emphasis added. cf. SNS, pp. 328–9/185–6; HT, xli/xlv) that affords the transcendentally disclosive experience of the indeterminacy of the pregiven world. This kind of selfless engagement clearly bears a formal similarity to Fink’s idea of ‘un-humanization’. But in substantive terms it differs markedly. For in contrast to Fink’s overarching Absolute, MerleauPonty’s radical emphasis on the contingent emergence of the world is more phenomenologically consistent. This is because even though Fink does not take the world for granted, he does take for granted that there is a world to be taken for granted. That is, he does not say uncritically that the world is there. But in taking for granted its determinacy, he does thereby presume that the constitution of the world ‘is’ there (i.e., ‘preexistently’). In an important way, then, Fink just shifts the locus of uncritical dogmatism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, le pre´juge´ du monde is just that, a prejudice. The determinate world is not, but is à faire, to be made, and the philosopher interested in truth is therefore required to engage in constitutive activity that is necessarily fraught with uncertainty and possible failure. Such is the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to the Finkian onlooker. Rather than severing from the mundane, the phenomenologist plunges into its thickness. In contrast to Fink’s ideal of non-participation, for Merleau-Ponty phenomenology involves an intensification of constitutive participation. In terms of productivity, he thus associates phenomenology with activities of creative transgression, those which generate from within themselves the ability to push the bounds of sense and expand the domain of reason,31 albeit without any pre-given metaphysical guarantees of success.32 Although he also refers to revolutionary politics, in general the kind of activity Merleau-Ponty had in mind can best be termed art. Thus, whereas Fink had stated in no uncertain terms that the productivity of the phenomenological onlooker is ‘not comparable to any mode of productivity pregiven in a worldly way’ (SCM, p. 86/76, emphasis added) Merleau-Ponty replies – unmistakably – that ‘philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing [pre´alable] truth, but, like art, the realization [re´alisation] of a truth’ (PhP, xv/xx, emphasis added). There could not be a more concise statement of Merleau-Ponty’s methodological departure from Fink. 685 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 2.2.2. . . . qui se ve´rifie en s’exerçant In addition to the capacity for selfless engagement, the productivity of phenomenology also requires a complementary capacity for communication. This relates to the problem of enworlding, how to un-perform the reduction, so to speak. Here it is necessary to approach Phenomenology of Perception in the light of Ludwig Binswanger’s article ‘Über Psychotherapie’.33 Given the ‘schizophrenic’ nature of the reduction for Merleau-Ponty, it should not be surprising that it is complemented by a ‘therapeutic’ moment, one that normatively affirms that a determinate common world should obtain. Based on a case of a successful cure of an aphonic hysteric, Binswanger’s article presents an account of existential psychotherapy that emphasizes the artistic creativity of therapeutic intervention, as well as the necessity of deep existential bonds between patient and therapist. Here we find an important model for Merleau-Ponty’s claim that phenomenology is ‘like art’. Binswanger described at length how his therapeutic intervention was not a theoretically derived procedure, but as an ‘artful response’ based on an impulsive, confident daring [Wagemut] (ÜP, p. 209). He claimed that psychotherapeutic cure comes about through the creative establishment of an existential relationship between doctor and patient involving ‘an original communicative novelty, a new linking of destiny – and this not only with regard to the patient-doctor relationship, but also and above all with regard to the purely human relationship in the sense of a genuine “with-another” [Miteinander]’ (ÜP, p. 215). Successful therapy is a matter of establishing new intersubjective bonds that overcome the patient’s ‘detachment from life’, thus freeing her from captivation in/by her subjective realm. In this sense, therapy is the link between individual idiosyncrasy (non-sense) and the shared intelligibility of the public world (sense). The therapeutic task is to foster the ‘genuine communication’ that will free the patient ‘from blind isolation, from the idios cosmos, as Heraclitus says, thus from mere life in his body, his dreams, his private inclinations, his pride and his exuberance, and to illuminate and liberate him for the ability to participate in the koinos cosmos, in the life of genuine fellowship [Koinonia] or community’ (ÜP, pp. 215–6). Merleau-Ponty strategically invokes Binswanger’s account of the therapeutic encounter at the end of Phenomenology of Perception. Here he claims that analysis succeeds by ‘binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships’, such that the complex can be dissolved by ‘a new pulsation of time with its own supports and motives’ (PhP, p. 519/ 455; cf. p. 190/163). The successful therapeutic encounter thus issues in a new fundamental temporalization [Urzeitigung]. Although Merleau-Ponty does not elaborate this remarkable claim, the implication is that the effec686 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT tiveness of the cure depends on the strength and durability of the new existential commitments, adding – significantly – that ‘the same applies in all cases of coming to awareness’ (PhP, p. 519/455, emphasis added). Binswanger’s account thus sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the ‘realization of philosophy’. This notion gives his postwar thought its driving impulse. Yet it is not altogether clear – philosophy’s realization is supposed to occur dialectically through its destruction insofar as it is ‘separate’. As we have seen, this implies an integration with reality that frees phenomenology from having to deal with Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding. We can now see that the separateness to be overcome is ultimately that of the mutual isolation of intuitional experience (‘multiple solipsism’) and that, for Merleau-Ponty, as the ‘gearing together’ [l’engrenage] of such experience (PhP, xv/xx) this overcoming just is the joint realization of philosophy and the world. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty interprets the aphonia of Binswanger’s patient as a ‘refusal of coexistence’, a withdrawal from the lived situation, such that the goal was for her to regain her voice (cf. PhP, p. 187/160). What Binswanger helps us to see is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the realization of philosophy is a practical matter of integrating each silent ‘idios cosmos’ into the discursive horizons of a self-consciously historical intersubjective community. In this Binswanger is key because, as Merleau-Ponty recognizes, the dialogical notion of encounter that he developed in the psychotherapeutic context has a general applicability. This is because it engages with the problem of mutual senselessness – the absence of a common world – in its most acute form. In this sense, existential psychotherapy paradigmatizes the molecular structure of achieved universality. The shared and mutually transformative understanding that results from such an encounter prefigures the common world of which an authentic intersubjectivity would be the living embodiment. 2.2.3. Phenomenology as Militant Practice Taken together, these capacities for selfless engagement and communication indicate the grounds on which Merleau-Ponty views his phenomenology as ‘militant’ – as opposed to ‘triumphant’ – philosophy (SNS, pp. 112, 237/64, 134). This characterization derives from the traditional theological trichotomy between ‘the Church suffering’, ‘the Church militant’, and ‘the Church triumphant’, denoting, respectively, Christians in purgatory, on Earth, and in heaven. Applied to post-Hegelian philosophy, the latter would refer to the tradition based on the speculative and systematic Hegel, thereby representing the idea that universality is essentially already achieved. The militant philosophy that Merleau-Ponty has in mind, on the other hand, pertains to the tradition that would take up the 687 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES younger, more radical Hegel (again, freely conflated with Marx) thus representing the idea that universality – the realization of the world – is an outstanding historical task for humanity (cf. SNS, p. 313/176–7). In his critique of liberalism, Merleau-Ponty expressed the underlying distinction very clearly: whereas triumphant thinking ‘takes universality for granted’ – an assumption of which Merleau-Ponty thought Fink’s meontic account was guilty – ‘the problem is its [universality’s] realization through the dialectic of concrete intersubjectivity’ (HT, p. 38n1/ 35n11, emphasis added). This militant model whereby sense is achieved out of non-sense represents germinally Merleau-Ponty’s view of phenomenological productivity. And it shows how he thinks it possible for transcendental philosophy to ‘not culminate in a return to the self’ (PhP, vii/xii, emphasis added). In contrast to Fink’s Absolute identity, for Merleau-Ponty the movement of phenomenology unfolds through human existential transformation that is communicated and redeemed through commitments to new intersubjective relations. As a practical project aimed at the realization of the world, phenomenology goes outside of itself in realizing itself, yet without ceasing to be ‘its own foundation’.34 Yet how can this phenomenological self-reference be demonstrated? This returns us to the problem of transcendental illusion. As we have seen, in his quest to overcome such illusion, Fink takes transcendental cognition as egological and strictly apodictic. He thus upholds the cognitive intentions of phenomenology by de-centering it as a practice based on human experience. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty interprets phenomenology in human existential terms – hence intersubjectively and practically. He thus de-centers phenomenology not only as an egological but also as a theoretical practice. He consequently holds that while all phenomenological cognition is intuitional, not all phenomenological intuition is cognitive. In this way Merleau-Ponty shows that phenomenology’s transcendental intentions can be humanly achieved. The catch, however, is that these intentions can no longer include the complete overcoming of transcendental illusion. 2.3. The Illusion of the Hero To show that the militant reinterpretation of phenomenology presented in Phenomenology of Perception is not just some arbitrary methodological eclecticism, Merleau-Ponty deploys a phenomenology of phenomenology purporting to show that the transcendental field is exhausted by intercorporeal involvement in the living present. To avoid a vicious regress, however, he also needs to bring to phenomenological self-givenness the anonymous productivity that underlies phenomenology. That is, he has to show intuitionally ‘man as productivity’ in order to make his phenomenology self-referential and demonstrate that it does indeed 688 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT leave no ‘uncomprehended residue’. Owing to the existential commitments that have guided him, though, Merleau-Ponty cannot make this a matter of theoretical cognition – in that sense there can be no ‘complete’ reduction (PhP, xiv/viii). The intuition in question must therefore be a kind of transcendental illusion that is taken on faith. This happens at the very end of Phenomenology of Perception – surely the most prominent location in the work. Here Merleau-Ponty qua philosopher falls silent, yielding to the (non-philosophical) ‘hero’ – understood as someone ‘lives to the limit [jusqu’au bout] his relation to men and the world’ – by quoting several lines from Antoine de SaintExupéry’s 1942 novel Pilote de guerre (PhP, p. 520/456). The very last of these is the most well known: ‘Man is but a knot of relations; these alone matter to man’. The lines in question are drawn from Saint-Exupéry’s recounting of a near-fatal aerial reconnaissance sortie that he flew in 1940. (Recall that Saint-Exupéry did fatally crash at the end of July 1944.) This account reads like a homily to self-sacrifice in the name of ‘Man’ [l’Homme], the essential and universal truth of human existence. As Saint-Exupéry put it, ‘the individual is only a path. What matters is Man, who takes that path’ (PG: p. 214). One must become Man, see as Man, as Saint-Exupéry claimed happened to him during that flight, when Man ‘took the place’ of his self-concerned individuality (PG: p. 217). Whence the lines with which Phenomenology of Perception concludes. Merleau-Ponty follows Saint-Exupéry in identifying the hero as ‘man’.35 Yet close scrutiny of the Exupérian text reveals a profound hostility to embodiment that appears to confound the thrust of MerleauPonty’s work. Most notably, Saint-Exupéry meant it literally when he said that a human being is nothing but a knot of relations. As he wrote (from which Merleau-Ponty quotes selectively): ‘what is essential appears when the body comes undone. Man is but a knot of relations; these alone matter to man. The body is an old crock that gets left behind’.36 On the face of it, then, it is quite perplexing that Phenomenology of Perception ends as it does. Clarity is gained only when we recognize that this ending has methodological import in relation to the ‘realization of philosophy’ – that it is the linchpin of the militant idea of method that Merleau-Ponty was working out in response to Fink. I have discussed this in detail elsewhere.37 For present purposes, it is sufficient to note that in identifying the hero as ‘man’, what Merleau-Ponty has in mind is ‘man as productivity’, and that as the subjective embodiment of this universality heroism results from living out the ‘loyalty to the natural movement that throws us toward things and toward others’ (SNS, p. 330/186, emphasis added). Heroism, in Merleau-Ponty’s usage, thus manifests a natural purposiveness that is 689 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES its own highest end – heroes, in other words, are those who wholly live their time.38 This reflects the ‘loyalty’ that ensures that heroes became ‘outwardly what they inwardly wished to be [. . .] melding with history at the moment when it claimed their lives’ (SNS, p. 258/146, emphasis added). What Merleau-Ponty aims to affirm with this account of SaintExupéry was that subjective life can be universal – one can become ‘man’. Heroic death is the limit case of existence. Incarnating a virtually complete reduction, it is ‘the point at which consciousness finally becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession’ (SNS, p. 112/64). This is Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘absolute knowing’. But in contrast to the theoretical detachment of Fink’s onlooker, for Merleau-Ponty this is a moment of absolute participation. And this is, of course, fatal.39 As with a complete reduction, attaining the absolute is not a living possibility. The ending of Phenomenology of Perception therefore does not illustrate an epistemic ideal, nor offer anything of cognitive value. Rather, it is a moment of subjective intuition, the putative content of which – viz., the coextensivity of meaningful reality with the fabric of human intersubjectivity – offers the illusion of absoluteness. It is a moment, in other words, of ‘nonknowledge’ that can be seen as marking the uncognizable outer limit of cognition. In contrast to Fink’s triumphant view, then, which is oriented to the absolute as an attainable object of theoretical knowledge, Merleau-Ponty’s militant phenomenology is oriented to it as a matter of practical faith. In short, the hero provides Merleau-Pontian phenomenology with what Kant called a ‘focus imaginarius’ (KrV, A645/B673). The idea is that if one believes Merleau-Ponty’s account of Saint-Exupéry, i.e., that he is indeed a ‘hero’ in the appropriate sense, then one gains intuitional grounds for affirming the theoretically undecidable claim that the productivity presupposed by phenomenology is a naturally purposive spontaneity that fully coheres with the project’s universal philosophical aspirations. This is precisely what Merleau-Ponty requires in order to settle the methodological problem of phenomenological self-reference on an intuitional basis. To show that beyond intercorporeal involvement there truly is nothing more to understand, he needs to present the productive force of phenomenology as already included therein. By thus showing the ‘external horizons’ of intuitional givenness as folding back into (‘melding with’) the living present, the spectacle of heroic death motivates the specific kind of ‘rational faith’ (cf. Kant, 1998: p. 10) by which phenomenology must orient itself at the limits of regressive analysis: the militant belief in a latent human universality that would be the condition sine qua non of the realization of philosophy and of the world.40 690 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT 3. Concluding Remarks It is instructive to consider the contrast between Fink and MerleauPonty as reflecting two fundamentally different ways in which phenomenology can relate to Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’. Clearly, Fink tries to surpass Kant.41 As we saw, whereas for Kant there can be no canon of pure theoretical reason, for Fink the canon of phenomenological reason is expressly conceived for the theoretical task of distinguishing appearance-truth from genuine transcendental truth. As ‘absolute science’ phenomenology would leave transcendental illusion behind. In particular, any positive regulative function that it might have had would be superseded, as there would no longer be a meaningful distinction between subjective and objective, hence no conflation. Likewise, Fink does not recognize the primacy of practical reason, nor the need for faith, regarding these as expressions of the limited and dogmatic nature of critical philosophy. Ultimately, through the breakthrough to the phenomenological onlooker, he aims to go beyond the sort of ectypal knowledge to which Kant limited human knowledge, to a kind of archetypal theoretical knowing that would be akin to the sort of intellectual intuition that Kant had, of course, strictly ruled out. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, tends more toward completing than going beyond Kant. To be sure, his general view of Kant is negative (see Leder, 1983, Dillon, 1987). But he also disagrees profoundly with Fink, and in certain respects this places him closer to Kant. In particular, seeing Fink’s attempt to go beyond intuition as itself still transcendentally naı̈ve, Merleau-Ponty approaches the transcendentality of phenomenology on a practical, not theoretical, basis.42 He thus accepts the primacy of practical reason, placing limits on theoretical claims, while retaining a positive role for transcendental illusion. Thus, whereas Fink confronts Kant on the terrain of the first Critique, Merleau-Ponty turns to the third. This is something that he intimates in The Structure of Behavior (SC, pp. 222–3, 223n/206, 248n41) and evinces at various points in Phenomenology of Perception. The issue here can be considered in terms of predicative nature of phenomenological claims. Simply put, whereas Fink’s meontic idea implies their taking the form of (conceptually adequate) ‘determining’ [bestimmend] judgments, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that phenomenological claims can – and, indeed, can only – be made in the form of (conceptually inadequate) ‘reflecting’ [reflectierend] judgments (see Kant, 2000: 67). Thus, for example, he argues that if there can be an awareness of ‘a harmony between the sensible and the concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any concept’, and if the subject of this awareness is not a universal thinker but an embodied perceiver, then ‘the hidden art of 691 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES the imagination must condition categorial activity. It is no longer merely aesthetic judgment, but knowledge as well which rests upon this art’ (PhP, xii/xvii; cf. Carbone, 1998). Here, then, is the root sense in which Merleau-Ponty’s view of phenomenology is, contra Fink, ‘like art’. Although Merleau-Ponty does not fully develop the implications of this, his idea of method involves granting reflecting judgment epistemic priority over theoretical understanding (Coole, 1984).43 Agreeing in effect with Kant that philosophical inquiry is not entirely oriented by principles that are constitutive of objects, Merleau-Ponty likewise ‘makes room for faith’ (KrV, B xxx). Whereas Fink does not see how any sort of subjective principle could have objective validity, Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, agrees with Kant that it is essential to reason – and a good thing, too – to take subjective ideas that do not and, indeed, could not arise from experience and to include them in the field of investigation (cf. Grier, 2001: p. 278). Like Kant’s claims concerning the systematic unity of reason, MerleauPonty’s demonstration of intercorporeal involvement as the locus of all philosophical problems provides a regulative vision for doing philosophy. And as with Kant’s, the epistemic status of this vision is ultimately buttressed by transcendental illusion, viz., the heroic Schein of human productivity. In regard to this, Merleau-Ponty’s position is fully consistent with Kant’s assertion that ‘this illusion (which we can, after all, prevent from deceiving us) is indispensably necessary [if] we want to direct the understanding beyond every given experience [. . .] and hence also to direct it to its greatest possible and utmost expansion’ (KrV, A645/B673). Recognition of this sort of affinity with Kant certainly goes against the grain of the received wisdom concerning Merleau-Ponty, where it is assumed that his radicalization of Husserl’s own radicalization of Kant must have placed him at a further remove from Kant. But that wisdom has not reckoned with Fink and his critique of the limits of regressive phenomenology. It is more accurate to say that in order to secure phenomenology’s methodological self-reference (and thereby to fulfill the Husserlian project) on an intuitional basis, it is – at least in part – back to Kant that Merleau-Ponty turned. But it must also be borne in mind that this turn was inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Marx, and thus guided by the idea that philosophy’s realization is ultimately extra-philosophical. Merleau-Ponty’s militant phenomenology diverged radically from Fink’s meontic position by relying on intuitional experience beyond theoretical knowledge, and thus embracing a kind of faith, rather than postulating theoretical experience beyond what can be experienced intuitionally. It ‘provides its own foundation’, in Husserl’s phrase,44 not through theoretical speculation, but through practical participation in a historical project of intersubjective self-realization wherein the world is not something to be known, but something to be made. To be sure, this may not be a better philosophical 692 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT position. But it is Merleau-Ponty’s standpoint in the immediate postwar period, which must therefore be interrogated and assessed accordingly.45 University of Memphis, United States Notes The following abbreviations are used in text (see below for complete bibliographic information). In cases of translations, pagination is given as original/ translation. Fink KS ‘Die phänomenologische Philosophie Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik’ / ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism’ SCM VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1 / Sixth Cartesian Meditation Merleau-Ponty HT Humanisme et terreur / Humanism and Terror PhP Phe´nome´nologie de la perception / Phenomenology of Perception PrP ‘Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques’ / ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences’ SC La Structure du comportement / The Structure of Behavior SNS Sens et non-sens / Sense and Non-Sense Other KrV PG ÜP Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (standard A/B pagination) Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de guerre Binswanger, ‘Über Psychotherapie’ 1 Specifically, Fink (1966a, 1966b, 1966c, 1966d). 2 Cf. Depraz (2006: p. 317): ‘at least with regard to the method and praxis of phenomenology, Fink’s influence on Merleau-Ponty appears decisive’. 3 Specifically, the copy that Fink had lent to Gaston Berger in 1934 (which did not include §12, ‘“Phenomenology” as Transcendental Idealism’). Fink’s text was first mentioned in Berger (1941: p. 115n1; cf. p. 106). Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, see his letter (1. X.42) to Hermann Van Breda (Van Breda, 1962: pp. 421–2). 4 See Van Breda’s letter to Merleau-Ponty (17 December 1945) where he suggested that Phenomenology of Perception ‘is too strongly under the influence of the “Sixth Meditation”’ (cited Bruzina, 1995: p. lxxxiii). 5 Kersten (1995) expressed a similar view, but misread Merleau-Ponty as having aimed at the same goal as the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. (This may be related to his apparent unawareness (1995: p. 49) that Berger’s copy of Fink’s text excluded §12.) Kersten’s account is alluded to positively by Crowell (2001: p. 263). A similar but more accurate view was expressed (but not developed) by Waldenfels (1997: pp. 71–3). 693 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 6 See the letters from Merleau-Ponty to Fink, cited in Bruzina (2002: p. 199). But also note Merleau-Ponty’s oblique critique (1960: pp. 202–3; cf. p. 222, 1964c: pp. 160–1; cf. p. 176). 7 We must also set aside for present purposes the question as to whether this text accurately reflected Fink’s own views. On that, see Bruzina (2004) which relies in part on the valuable material now available in Fink (2006, 2008). 8 For this purpose I shall also make use of other texts by Merleau-Ponty from the immediate postwar period – primarily Sense and Non-Sense, but also Humanism and Terror. Although these volumes were published in 1948 and 1947 respectively, all of the material to which I refer was originally published in 1945 or 1946 – in fact, between the publication of Phenomenology of Perception and Merleau-Ponty’s lecture ‘The Primacy of Perception’ (23 November 1946). There was no significant change in his views within this interval. 9 As we shall see, since it thus transcends the categories of ontology, Fink refers to this account as ‘meontic’. See Bruzina (1995: pp. lv–lvii, 2004: 366f). 10 On the history of the document, see Bruzina (1995: p. vii–xxxv). 11 Hence the triadic ‘performance-structure’ [Vollzugsstruktur] of the phenomenological reduction—i.e., the theory of ‘the three egos’ (KS, p. 122/115f). 12 Although at one point Fink suggests that the onlooker ‘produces itself’ (SCM, p. 43/39) thereby emphasizing the onlooker’s radical difference from both the human and transcendental-constituting subjects, his considered view is that it is merely the ‘functional exponent’ of transcendental life (SCM, p. 44/40; cf. pp. 65, 73/58, 65). 13 But see SCM, pp. 37–41/34–7, where Fink gives indications to the contrary. 14 Even though for Kant it represents the determination of the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason, and as such is prefigured throughout the work as the real conclusion (see Grondin, 1990). 15 Kant: ‘By canon I mean the sum of a priori principles governing the correct use of certain cognitive powers as such’ (KrV, A796/B824). 16 Although Fink largely avoids this more provocative terminology in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, it does express the salient idea more clearly. See SCM, p. 147/134; cf. p. 111/101. 17 See Husserl’s discussion of the ‘transcendental illusion’ of solipsism, which expresses the need to press ahead with the ‘systematic unfolding of the constitutive problematic’ (1969, §96.b, 241f). 18 As Fink put it: the onlooker ‘becomes passively participant in world-constitution insofar as [. . .] it is encompassed by the self-enworlding of the constituting I’ (SCM, p. 119/108). Transcendental life turns in upon itself and the constitutive activities of primary enworlding ‘sweep the [onlooker] along’ [reissen . . . mit] into the world (SCM, p. 119/109) – the onlooker is ‘carried off [fortgetragen] by it and made mundane’ (SCM, p. 119/108; cf. p. 125/114). 19 SCM, pp. 86, 173–179/77, 155–159. See also Bruzina, 1986: p. 24, 1992: p. 279. Cf. Westphal, 1998. 20 ‘The concept of “intellectual intuition” and above all that of (Hegel’s) “speculative knowledge” is a genuine presentiment of the productivity of phenomenologizing “theoretical experience”’ (SCM, p. 86/77). 21 This is less an account of the details of the phenomenological reduction as Merleau-Ponty understands this, than an account of its existential possibility – including of the extraworldliness that it implies – in concrete human terms. 22 Or equivalently, the impossibility of Fink’s onlooker – which Merleau-Ponty had already effectively dismissed in The Structure of Behavior by demonstrating the impossibility of ‘complete integration’ (SC, p. 227/210). 694 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT 23 As he also insisted upon attributing it to Husserl (PhP, xiii, 415/vii, 361, SNS, p. 237/134 1960: p. 97, 1964c: p. 107, 1973: p. 45). On this, see Zahavi (2002: pp. 23–8). 24 A claim he also made explicitly (HT, p. 20/18). Cf. Zahavi (2002: p. 24) where a 1927 research manuscript of Husserl’s is cited to the effect that ‘the absolute reveals itself as the intersubjective relation between subjects’. 25 It is ‘by living my time’, ‘by plunging into [m’enfonçant] the present and the world [. . .] that I am able to understand other times’ – i.e., accede to the universal (PhP, p. 520/456). 26 This is consistent with the dubious note that Merleau-Ponty sounds with respect to constructive phenomenology on the opening page of Phenomenology of Perception. 27 Recall Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘the experience of absurdity and that of absolute self-evidence are mutually implicatory, and even indistinguishable’ (PhP, p. 342/295f). 28 See note 12. 29 Merleau-Ponty was presumably citing Fink (SCM, p. 43/39): ‘In der universalen Epoché, in der Ausschaltung aller Glaubenssetzungen, produziert sich der phänomenologische Zuschauer selbst’. 30 See above. Also, cf. Fink’s comment about phenomenology’s ‘methodische “Schizophrenie”’ (1976b: p. 192). 31 ‘The revolutionary movement, like the work of the artist, is an intention which itself creates its instruments and its means of expression’ (PhP, p. 508/ 445, emphasis added; cf. PhP, p. 519/455). Cf. SNS, p. 109/63. 32 ‘[O]nly the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said’ (SNS, p. 32/19; cf. PhP, p. 491/429). Likewise, the revolutionary movement remains an abstract idea ‘until it is worked out in interhuman relations’ (PhP, p. 509/446). 33 Merleau-Ponty referred to this article six times in the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception entitled ‘Le corps comme être sexué’, and returned to it at the very end of the book. 34 In the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty makes an important allusion to Husserl’s phrase, ‘Rückbeziehung der Phänomenologie auf sich selbst’ (PhP, xvi/xxi). 35 See ‘Man, the Hero’ [‘Le Héros, l’Homme’] (SNS, pp. 323–31/182–7). 36 ‘Quand le corps se de´fait, l’essentiel se montre. L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de relations. Les relations comptent seules pour l’homme. Le corps, vieux cheval, on l’abandonne’ (PG, p. 176). 37 ‘On the Problem of Exupérian Heroism in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Philosophy, McGill University, 2006). See also ‘Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology,’ Continental Philosophy Review 43(2) (2010), 167–91. 38 See note 25. 39 Merleau-Ponty is unequivocal: concerning heroism, ‘the man who is still able to speak does not know what he is talking about’ (SNS, p. 258/146). 40 This faith in effect coincides with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘perceptual faith’ (which he also characterizes as ‘primary’ or ‘primordial’) but this cannot be addressed here. 41 In a lecture to the Kant-Gesellschaft in 1935, Fink stated that ‘phenomenological philosophy does not raise the claim to want to improve or extend the Kantian solution to the transcendental problem.’ This is because ‘it is in com- 695 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 42 43 44 45 plete disagreement with Kant with respect to how the transcendental problem is posed’ (1976a: p. 32). On this idea, see my ‘Merleau-Ponty and the “Naturalization” of Phenomenology’, Philosophy Today 54(5) (2010), 187–96. 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