The Visible and the Invisible: Chapter 1 — Reflection and Interrogation

This post contains my writing on The Visible and the Invisible chapter one, “Reflection and Interrogation.” The headings here correspond to the subdivisions of chapter one. This writing was written without the intention for sharing. It was meant for me to express the ideas I had after directly reading the chapter. As such, the understanding shown below is merely a draft, so to speak.

The Perceptual Faith and Its Obscurity

This section¹ presupposes an understanding of the Phenomenology of Perception because its goal seems to merely be to elucidate the dilemma fundamental to MP’s metaphysics: how the subjective contacts the objective, or how our private worlds meet at a shared world (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1968, 10–11). This follows from the earlier comments that philosophy is not about word-meanings—philosophy is not of the order of the said or written—but about bringing to expression the silence of things themselves (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 4). Hence, I’d say the motif of this section is to explain how there seems to be dichotomies or poles but that they are in actuality illusions of a single moment. I anticipate this to be the inquisitive groundwork for the book.

Science Presupposes the Perceptual Faith and Does Not Elucidate It

As the title of the section suggests, MP explains how science portrays itself as revealing Being, when it in fact obscures it by covering up the mystery of perception (i.e. its perceptual faith). MP characterizes the ontology of science, physics, and psychology alike, as objectivist ontology, which leaves the objective inaccessible to the subjective (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1968, 16)—physics takes the absolute viewpoint of a subject look out onto the objective world, while psychology assumes an absolute spectator that witnesses the subject trapped in subjectivity (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 19–20). It is the task of philosophy to abandon this subject-object ontology, which is something like an approximation of reality (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 23), by looking at the context of the unified, total experience the distinction emerges from. (MP mentions some conclusions about perception from the introduction of the Phenomenology of Perception here, namely, how the perceptual field cannot be fully explained/accounted for solely by composing or summing external/objective conditions, for we saw that when we limit ourselves to objective conditions, the conditioned conditions other conditions; hence, there are conditions, but they are not of the order of the objective (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 20–21).) Importantly, this does not mean showing that there is another “order of reality” (the mental over the material, or the interior over the exterior) outside what science’s objectivist ontology conceives, for that would be to somehow once again fall into a subject-object ontology (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 22), nor does it mean objective thought (which seems to be another way of saying objectivist ontology? Not sure) should just be abandoned as an incorrect fiction, for science is actually just a phase that should be overcome by means of this re-examination of subject-object ontology (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 24).

Perceptual Faith and Reflection

1. Situate a person in this passage/text who has never read it before. MP is coming from explaining his gripes with how the mystery of perception has been covered over by that which attempts to explain the world. He now discusses how this all revolves around the failings of perception, and he anticipates the possibility of a philosophy of reflection evolving into a philosophy of hyper-reflection.

2. Communicate to this person the ideas I found most interesting or relevant from the passage/text. This section appears very foundational to understanding the crucial shifts in his metaphysical thinking from his earlier works (e.g. Phenomenology of Perception). It centers around describing (somewhat) what a philosophy of reflection is, where it goes wrong, and how we can move beyond it.

   Upon first impression, I identified the term “philosophy of reflection” as synonymous to “intellectualism” as the term is used in Phenomenology of Perception. But quickly became obvious that this is a designation for a new category: I believe MP truly refers to all philosophizing that involves reflection, or analysis—so this would include both intellectualism and empiricism but also, I think for the most part, the reasoning that Phenomenology of Perception takes up.

   Philosophies of reflection are philosophies that employ reflection. I think “reflection” refers to the looking-back at perceptions and analyzing them, breaking them down to discover their nature; for instance, Husserl’s goal was to discover the invariant essences of experiences (transcendental reduction) to arrive at the essence of the intentional object (eidetic reduction). But realist scientists also take themselves to be peering into the nature of reality by looking-then-analyzing it. I think basically all philosophy and science reflects. MP’s argument is that reflection necessarily misses the mark because its claims are retroactive, a “regressive analysis” he writes once (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 45): they are made about a perception, so what reflection yields is not the original perception per se but a “perception-reflection-upon,” and instead of a thing, the result is a “thing-perceived-within-perception-reflected-upon” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 38). Philosophy of reflection thinks that the reflecting upon something straightforwardly breaks down what that thing is, when in reality, the initial perception prior to the understanding of analysis stands untouched because the mystery of how we had a perception that could be analyzed in so-and-so way from the start. To neglect this fact is to forget the “non-knowing of the beginning which is not nothing” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 49). By neglecting the perception prior to reflection which founds that reflection, we waive off the perception as “literally nothing” (this might end up just being a rephrasing of the final pages of the introduction to Phenomenology of Perception):

   … every resistance to its [reflection’s] exercise being from the first treated not as an adversity of the things but as a simple state of non-thought… about which there is nothing to say since it is literally nothing. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 44)

   Additionally, they are thoughts about things, not the things themselves. I think the point is that our reflections render the world into an idea, or a thought, whereas the world cannot be reduced the subject’s thoughts. In other words, a philosophy of reflection believes that the world and thoughts about the world coincide (e.g. “the being-self is given to me in the adequation of my thought with itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 48)) (whereas they do not). (This is why, I think, MP regards philosophy hitherto as playing with word-meanings: to signify is to essentialize (to fix particulars under a universal), and reflection is all about essentializing.) This is a holdover from or transposition of perception, an insight we see from the Phenomenology: as appearances make way for further appearances, we take what we see now as what has always been despite previous appearances being phenomenally different. Analogously, we take our analyses about a thing to be identical with the thing analyzed. In other words, philosophies of reflection think they can retrace the steps back to an original unreflected perception (which I think the Phenomenology assumes!, which is why I take this to be a critique of the mid-MP), but such a philosophy is circular because what it finds at the origin is what was put into it by this reflective analysis (I think).

   The above two halves of every philosophy of reflection can be consolidating into this remark: philosophy of reflection is of “an order of idealization and of the ‘after-the-fact’ which is not that wherein the world is formed” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 45). Both points are two sides of the same coin: there is a characteristic distance between the world and our reflection (thoughts about perception). (Consequently, the subject and the world are merely “pure correlation” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 47), that is, merely parallel regions; in actuality, in a Hegelian move, they are internally dependent as opposed to externally related.) Indeed, reflection requires that one take a step away to look up the unreflected thing, which is to say, that the subject must detach itself from their participation in the world to reflect upon it:

   … every effort to comprehend the spectacle of the world… demands that we detach ourselves from the effective unfolded of our perceptions and from our perception of the world, that we cease being one with the concrete flux of our life in order to retrace the total bearing and principle articulations of the world upon which it opens. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 45)

   Hence why Husserl realized that “every transcendental reduction is also an eidetic reduction” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 45).

   So we need to recognize the pitfalls of reflection and overcome it, finding the “secret of our perceptual bond with it [the world]” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 38).² How do we do this? MP doesn’t resort to a naive rejection of reflection; instead, he thinks that we should take philosophy of reflection as one stage that is useful but has its flaws and should be advanced from. (This makes sense, since he uses reflection to discover the pitfalls of reflection, as far as I can tell.) This is where I believe the influence of Hegel is strongest, and where I think he most clearly demonstrates an evolution from his analysis in Phenomenology of Perception. It seems MP’s point is that there is perception, perception-reflected-upon, the thing, and the thing-perceived-within-perception-reflected-upon, and instead of trying to recover perception (the unreflected) and the thing(-in-itself, as opposed to the phenomenal thing), we should create a philosophy of hyper-reflection (elsewhere he describes this as a “philosophy of total reflection” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 43) because it takes into account the total situation, that is, perception and reflection-on-perception conjointly): reflect upon how a perception is simultaneously accompanied by a reflection about that perception which is necessarily at a distance from it yet coexists with it. A philosophy of total reflection, then, will be able to contact the two problems a philosophy of reflection leaves untouched: understanding the “effective world” and how we can ideate about the world via reflection (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 43).

References

The The Visible and Invisible by Merleau-Ponty series

This post is just one installation of the The Visible and Invisible by Merleau-Ponty series. Below is a list of all the posts in this series:

1. The Visible and the Invisible: Chapter 1 — Reflection and Interrogation this post!