Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World

Philosophy and Literature

Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823288144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature.From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas, " from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance, " from Valéry came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics.The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

PART I

Merleau-Ponty’s Poets

1

“The Proustian Corporeity” and “The True Hawthorns”

Merleau-Ponty as a Reader of Proust between Husserl and Benjamin

MAURO CARBONE

It is there that I have lived in calm voluptuousness,

In the center of the blue, amidst the waves and splendors.

—Charles Baudelaire, Previous Existence

The work of a great novelist always rests on two or three philosophical ideas. For … Proust, [these are] the way the past is involved in the present and the presence of times gone by. The function of the novelist is not to state these ideas thematically but to make them exist for us in the way that things exist.… It is nonetheless surprising that, when writers do take a deliberate interest in philosophy, they have such difficulty in recognizing their affinities.… Proust sometimes translates his intuition about time into a relativistic and skeptical philosophy and at other times into hopes of immortality which distort it just as much.… For a long time it looked as if philosophy and literature not only had different ways of saying things but had different objects as well. Since the end of the 19th century, however, the ties between them have been getting closer and closer. (SNS, 34–35/26–27)

This is how, at the beginning of his 1945 article “Metaphysics and the Novel,” Merleau-Ponty formulates some fundamental ideas, which I find particularly important. In Chapter 4, I will focus on this article with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s coeval and successive writings on related topics, like the supposed mutations of the relationship between “philosophy and literature … since the end of the 19^th century” (SNS, 35/27). I will also take into account Merleau-Ponty’s evolving reflection on Proust’s peculiar description from In Search of Lost Time of how some actual ideas “exist for us in the way that things exist,” to use a meaningful expression from the aforementioned quotation. In the present chapter, I will focus my attention on what Merleau-Ponty indicates as one of the core “philosophical ideas” of Proust’s oeuvre, namely, “the envelopment of the past in the present and the presence of lost time” (SNS, 34/26).

“The Function of the Body in Memory”

In Phenomenology of Perception—namely Merleau-Ponty’s most important achieved book, published in the same year of “Metaphysics and the Novel”—such a “philosophical idea” seems to be mainly traced in what he calls “the function of the body in memory” (PhP, 211/187). In fact, it is precisely about this topic that Merleau-Ponty quotes the largest Proustian passage included in his book:

when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavor to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.… My body, the side upon which I was lying, faithful guardians of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its urn-shaped bowl of Bohemian glass that hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my grandparents’ house, in those far distant days which at this moment I imagined to be in the present without being able to picture them exactly. (PhP, 211n1/530n11)¹

According to Merleau-Ponty, the experience described in this Proustian page reveals that “memory is not the constituting consciousness of the past, but rather an effort to reopen time beginning from the implications of the present,” and that “the body, being our permanent means of ‘adopting attitudes’ and hence of creating pseudo-presents, is the means of our communication with both time and space” (PhP, 211/187). This happens also when our experience is “unreflected,” like the one Proust describes. Indeed, in this case too, our body lives in an uninterrupted relation with a spatiotemporal totality. Edmund Husserl defined this kind of relation as intentionality, which he considered to be unbreakable. This is what one should keep in mind when reading his famous claim according to which “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” In other words, for Husserl, intentionality qualifies the very essence of consciousness (understood in its insuppressible link with our body) and characterizes it in terms of relationship.

As showed by the Proustian description, such a relation is first of all outlined in the encounter by which the sensible world gives itself to our living body (Leib). Concerning such an encounter, in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty highlights that

Husserl distinguishes between act intentionality—which is the intentionality of our judgments and of our voluntary decisions …—and operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität), the intentionality that establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and of our life, the intentionality that appears in our desires, our evaluations, and our landscape more clearly than it does in objective knowledge. (PhP, XIII/xxxii)

This second intentional mode is the one at work in our unreflected life, that is to say, precisely operating in the originating and always renewed relation between our living body and the sensible world. Indeed, “operative” intentionality is defined by Husserl as “life experiencing the world [welterfahrendes Leben]”² through a relation that is “operating” without being thematized by any act of consciousness. In paragraph 28 of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl characterizes the “operative” as “a residuum that remains unthematic—remains, so to speak anonymous.”³ In other words, he characterizes the “operative” as that peculiar relation with things that has not been thematized as an explicit thought, and hence maintains its feature of “passive synthesis,” since the synthesis of the sensible in virtue of which such a relation is given has not been posited by an act of consciousness, but works as a “passive having of the world [Welthabe].”⁴

Since Phenomenology of Perception, this operative intentionality is at the core of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical enquiry and constitutes one of the main reasons for his interest in the Recherche. In fact, Merleau-Ponty traces the description of operative intentionality, which is at work in the unreflected mutual exchange between our body and the sensible world, in pages such as the aforementioned. Therefore, he explicitly refers to it in order to highlight how the living body, as we already read, is precisely “the means of our communication with both time and space.”

In this light, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks, like Proust’s, reveal a tendency to accentuate the corporeal tonality of temporal experience with respect to Husserl’s phenomenology of the constitutive ego and the related notion of Erlebnis,⁵ as well as with respect to the conception of memory that sprang from Husserl’s own theories. Indeed, in a Proustian way, Merleau-Ponty writes that protensions and retentions “do not emanate from a central I, but somehow from my perceptual field itself” (PhP, 476/439). Still, at this stage of Merleau-Ponty’s meditation, the difference between Proust’s, Husserl’s, and his own perspective is not yet clear to him. This is the reason why, in Phenomenology of Perception, he tends to assimilate the reminiscences produced by the involuntary memory to the notion of retention elaborated by Husserl, as he writes in the chapter titled “Temporality”:

When I uncover the concrete origin of the memory, this is because it again takes its place in a certain current of worry and hope that runs from Munich to the war, because I rejoin lost time, because, from the moment at issue right up until my present, the chain of retentions and the interlinking of successive horizons assures a continuous passage. (PhP, 478/441; my emphasis)⁶

Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the aforementioned corporeal tonality of our temporal experience by quoting precisely the Proustian description of the half-sleep to which another philosopher, Walter Benjamin, also made reference for similar reasons.

“No explicit trace” of Benjamin’s work is present “in the whole body” of Merleau-Ponty’s own texts, “unpublished writings included.”⁷ Moreover, Benjamin’s somehow suspicious attitude concerning notions such as that of intention⁸ has contributed in qualifying his thinking as resolutely antiphenomenological. Nevertheless, in a footnote to his essay titled “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin points out how the most famous Proustian discovery, that of involuntary memory, roots such memory in our corporeity. He recalls that Proust

recurs with a particular predilection to the body parts, and does not cease to evoke the images of memory that are thereby gathered, showing how, without obeying to any sign of whatever consciousness, such images immediately impose themselves on consciousness itself, as soon as a sleeper’s thigh, arm, or scapula involuntarily regains the position it had before. The involuntary memory of body parts is one of Proust’s favorite topics.⁹

Differently from Merleau-Ponty, who traces in Proust’s excerpt the phenomenological configuration of the Leib, Benjamin interprets the same passage as a characterization of involuntary memory that does not seem to refer to a unitary experience of the body, such as the one that phenomenology traditionally tends to take into account; instead, the involuntary memory is autonomously fragmented in the different parts of the body in which it has been sedimenting: “its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades.”¹⁰ Still, it is important to remark that both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin highlight the corporeal feature of involuntary memory as it is described in the Proustian passage; hence, they both propose the autonomy of such memory from the activity of consciousness.

Hence, on the one hand, in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty tends to find that the Proustian descriptions do not have divergent characteristics with respect to the teachings of Husserl’s phenomenology. Indeed, he mainly tends to interpret such teachings precisely according to those characteristics, as we saw both in the case of the corporeal tonality of temporal experience, and in the case of the unitary configuration of the corporeal experience. And anyway, Merleau-Ponty sees no contradiction between them, as it happens with the phenomenological conception of temporal continuity with respect to the famous and celebrated “intermittences” of the Proustian time.¹¹

On the other hand, in prolonging the comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin as readers of Proust, it is important to highlight that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of intentionality, which I summarized earlier, has nothing to do with the critical reasons that, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, had urged Benjamin to define truth as “an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention.”¹² Or, we could add, at least the sleep of “act intentionality.” In this sense, both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin were trying to find and describe an approach to the being of truth and to Being itself not centered on consciousness. This is why they were both so deeply interested in the experience evoked in the aforementioned ...