Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Including Texts by Edmund Husserl. Edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo.
Michael Culbreth
9-17-08

Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology is a valuable and interesting read, partly because it offers us original material from 4 thinkers: Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, as well as writings from editors Lawlor and Bergo. The primary value in this text, however, is Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Husserl’s incomplete philosophy that he was putting forth before he died, which, in turn, gives us valuable insight into Merleau-Ponty’s own unfinished thought just prior to his own demise.
Also of importance, writes Lawlor in his forward, is the convergences between the late Husserl and Heidegger that Merleau-Ponty notices in his readings of The Origin of Geometry and other Husserl manuscripts. According to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s concept of the genesis of sense is very similar to Heidegger’s notion of the Ereignis (event of appropriation) of Being. What the two ideas have in common in ‘vertical history’, which (roughly) means being in the present (but a deep present, that connects with other things). The Abgrund (abyss, without ground) is another similarity between Husserl and Heidegger that Merleau-Ponty brings to light. The past is an Abgrund, and it constitutes the depth of the present. Merleau-Ponty then touches on Heidegger and the late Husserl’s similar approach to language as an Abgrund (or the Abgrund, as Lawlor puts it).
Lawlor also discusses the ties between Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. Husserl’s own The Origin of Geometry discusses the process of writing, and how it can validate (or institute) geometrical concepts. Lawlor mentions this is a convergence of Derrida and Merleau-Ponty; they both think that writing is necessary in the creation of an ideal, or, more specifically, the grounding of them as ideals, once they’ve become ideals. There are also important differences between Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, which Lawlor discusses.
The first writing by Merleau-Ponty featured is his summary for a course primarily dedicated to The Origin of Geometry. Here Merleau-Ponty touches on the same issues Husserl grapples with in his late career, primarily, the problem of a truly phenomenological approach to history that can show us a things epistemological roots (in this case, geometry). How do we activate a geometry’s original self-evidence that spawned it? How is geometry made to be ‘for everyone’?
There is also the issue of language. How is speech involved in the transference of our thoughts into ideals? Husserl mulls over this problem in Origin a good deal. It’s a very complicated process, and Husserl does not fully resolve it. Backtracking a bit, how is geometry true and readily available for everyone, in spite of whatever their spatiotemporal bearings might be? How can people a hundred years ago access a body of knowledge that we can access today? And how can we build onto these handed down ideals, in any meaningful way, if we didn’t participate in the originary experiences that originally made these ideals? We still don’t know how these ideals were formed in a way that made that available to all throughout space and time.
Husserl seems to say that we can’t reactivate geometry’s originary giveness, because to do so, we would have to reactivate all the retentions within geometry, from our present and back to the beginning of geometry. How could we ever add to geometry if we are always directing ourselves actively to the swarms of retentions that constitute it? But if we don’t access that originary, self-evident, given foundation of geometry, how are we really interacting with the real experience, and not with what it has handed to us in passing conversation of textbooks? Merleau-Ponty deals with all this in a very unique way, but first I want to stay on Husserl first.
Husserl wants to find a way that allows for us to access the original experiences behind geometry (Merleau-Ponty will later say that we can never fully do that). He delves into the intersubjective experience, and much like in his Crisis of the European Sciences, he tries to say empathy is roughly equivalent to experiencing something in it’s most given nature. And that is how experience is exchanged among egos in an intersubjective world, according to Husserl. Language is part of the transference of meaning between us egos. Written language keeps an idea readily available to all, even when the originater(s) of that thought sleep or perish. In a way, this sediments the written, but it doesn’t quite make it ideal. Language constitutes part of the horizon through which the ideals make themselves known to us, but it is not language which elevates something like geometry into the ideal we know it as.
Merleau-Ponty is struggling with how to reactivate the originary sense of geometry too, in his course notes. He seems to argue a point that we can never fully reactivate the originary sense of geometry, and that part of the thought isn’t reactivated, but stays as part of the sedimentation that founds the series of retentions which we encounter. And Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that our retentions mingle with current phenomenon, the past somehow couples with the present as we understand it.
Merleau-Ponty then goes on to discuss Husserl’s empathy. Elaborating on the concept, he redefines empathy with others as something as an ‘interweaving’, an important facet of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. Because we are always connected to ‘others’, through a systematized language, and a cultural context, our intersubjective experience, our experience is a synthesized interweaving of our personal experience and that which we acquire through empathy with others.
In other writings featured in the text, Husserl discusses the planet Earth, and how we interact with it, phenomenologically. Yes, this planet is a sphere. But we don’t directly perceive it as a sphere, no, we can’t directly perceive this planet all at once, in it’s totality. Rather it manifests to us as a series of experiences that can be brought together in a synthesis as the “unified Earth”. But intuitively, how could we account for the fact that the planet is moving around the sun, and spinning on an axis? Is this possible without a relapse back into the handed down science of Copernicus?
Well, Husserl goes on to say that we can at least perceive of the planet as being a corporeal body, through our continuous experience on it, and through empathy in the intersubjective world of others, which informs us more of earth’s vastness. Through the unity of all of these experiences, we are able to constitute earth as a corporeal body that grounds us all. This doesn’t solve the problem of earth’s movement, and our ability to be aware of it. Merleau-Ponty dips into describing bodies. We see our flesh differently than we see the flesh of other bodies. We experience flesh that is outside our own as only ‘external’. Our bodies, our flesh, don’t move as spatial objects to us. According to Husserl, they are only experiencable as inner phenomena. Instead of perceiving ourselves move, we, more often than not, will the emotions, and are aware of our actions as willed.
For Merleau-Ponty, empathy, and his interweaving, will connect us to the other perspectives of this planet, and gives us a greater sense of it’s corporeality. And if we fly on an airplane, we have retentions of standing on the ground, and the two different modes of being on it can synthesize for us on expand on our accepted notions of possible being on the earth. Eventually a spherical shape could be deduced, based on the experiences of ending back up at one singular point after traveling in a straight direction long enough.
Merleau-Ponty concludes his notes on Husserl, citing a paradox in his thinking. There seems to be an unreconciled split in how we constitute the world; namely, the “realist-causal order and the idealist-constituting order (Merleau-Ponty, 76)”. Simplified, the realization of the idealizations out there causes problems for Merleau-Ponty. What happens to our geometrical constructs, if the constituting minds that constitute them cease to be? Do the idealizations stay, even without us to activate and reactivate them? If so, would they be of a greater validity than our direct experiences? Or do they just not exist, until we ‘re-produce’ them? Merleau-Ponty is bothered by this suggestion within Husserl’s thought.
Bettina Bergo’s afterward gives further context into the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s nuanced reading of Husserl, from his take on the epoche to other divergences with the father of phenomenology. All in all, this is a valuable book, though garbled in some parts, due to the fact that the bulk of the text is Merleau-Ponty’s loosely organized course notes. But sifting through them provides the reader with needed explanations and re-workings of concepts from late Husserl, which serve to make them thinker more comprehensible, or at least considered from a fresh new perspective. More importantly, it shows Husserl’s influence on the thought of Merleau-Ponty, and the subtle and not so subtle ways he differs from him, and the turn Merleau-Ponty’s thought was taking just before his death.

Works Cited:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. 2002. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-1747-9.