An Unprecedented Deformation

Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas

Mauro Carbone, Niall Keane

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438430225
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Fenomenología en filosofía

French novelist Marcel Proust made famous "involuntary memory, " a peculiar kind of memory that works whether one is willing or not and that gives a transformed recollection of past experience. More than a century later, the Proustian notion of involuntary memory has not been fully explored nor its implications understood. By providing clarifying examples taken from Proust's novel and by commenting on them using the work of French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philosopher Mauro Carbone interprets involuntary memory as the human faculty providing the involuntary creation of our ideas through the transformation of past experience. This rethinking of the traditional way of conceiving ideas and their genesis as separated from sensible experience—as has been done in Western thought since Plato—allows the author to promote a new theory of knowledge, one which is best exemplified via literature and art much more than philosophy.

CHAPTER 1

Nature: Variations on the Theme

“Why are there several samples of each thing?”

I. NATURE AND ONTOLOGY

The last courses that Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France focus on the “concept of Nature” on the one hand, and the “possibility of philosophy today” on the other. Merleau-Ponty brings together under the first heading both the courses of 1956–57 and the courses of 1957–58—of these courses, the latter, centered on “Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture,” purport to be the “continuation” of the former. In 1959–60, Merleau-Ponty uses his last complete course to discuss the further issue of “Nature and Logos: the Human Body.” As for Merleau-Ponty's reflections on “the possibility of philosophy today,” one can trace these not only to the 1958–59 course, where that expression actually appears,¹ but also to other courses: two courses which Merleau-Ponty's unexpected death left unfinished—“Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel” and “Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today”—and the remaining course of 1959–60, entitled “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.”

What is the connection between these two foci of attention toward which Merleau-Ponty's last reflections converge? Undoubtedly, the connection lies within the problem of what he called “new ontology”: the problem of its configuration and of its philosophical formulation.² Indeed, the preparatory notes for the last course dedicated to the “concept of Nature”—the goal of which is to define the “place of these studies in philosophy” (N, 263/203)—speak of “the ontology of Nature as a way toward ontology—a way that we prefer because the evolution of the concept of Nature is a more convincing propaedeutic, since it more clearly shows the necessity of the ontological mutation” (N, 265/204). Evidently, by retracing the path of what Merleau-Ponty had previously defined as the “philosophical history of the idea of Nature” (N, 117/83), as well as by exploring, with the help of contemporary science, the “problems posited” (ibid.) by this very history, these courses are an effort to show that a particular relationship operates between humanity and Being. This relationship eludes the modern formula that counterposes subject and object. According to Merleau-Ponty, our epoch has made this relationship more evident, but has not been able to give an explicit philosophical formulation for it, an onto-logy. This is most specifically the theme of the lectures on “Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today.”³

I have already mentioned this, but it is still worth emphasizing: Merleau-Ponty's enquiry concerning Nature is not the kind of enquiry that, because of its ontological orientation, confronts the scientific standpoint with an attitude of denial. Just the opposite: it holds that such a confrontation with the scientific perspective cannot be avoided, and advocates an attitude of critical listening.

Clearly, one should not expect to find in science a fully elaborated ontology capable of taking the place of the modern ontology, according to which Nature is the absolute Object and in which the Subject is Kosmotheorós (an equally absolute spectator). As Merleau-Ponty contends, science as such “does not provide an ontology, not even under a negative form. It has only the power to divest pseudo-evidence of its pretension to be evidence” (N, 145/106). Still, the formulation of ontological hypotheses, which is the task of philosophy, ought to be based on the outcomes of scientific inquiries too. In fact, Merleau-Ponty consistently emphasizes the way in which currents of twentieth-century scientific inquiry decisively converge. According to him, they converge in “emptying of evidence” the opposing causalistic and finalistic conceptions of Nature—which he considers “concepts of artificialism”—(RC 117/151) along with the idea of the separability of existence and essence⁴ (which he holds to be equally artificial).

II. MELODY AND SPECIES

Merleau-Ponty sees a contribution to this kind of “emptying of evidence” in Jakob von Uexküll's theories. These theories see biology as an autonomous science inspired by Goethe's conception of the knowledge of Nature, and consequently as essentially anti-Darwinistic⁵; on this basis, they see the study of the reciprocal action between the organism and its environment as the specific task of biology. Onto his examination of Uexküll's theories, Merleau-Ponty grafts the ontological hypothesis that he attempts to elaborate. In so doing, he presents his own hypothesis in an especially enlightening way.

Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that the notion of animal environment (Umwelt) put forth by Uexküll—and which Merleau-Ponty explicates as “the milieu that the animal gets for itself ” (N, 226/172; trans. modified)—is a novel one, and is independent from Kant's or Schelling's philosophical framework (despite the fact that, for Merleau-Ponty, Uexküll's thought sometimes seems to place such a notion there).⁶ According to Merleau-Ponty, the novelty of this notion consists precisely in the way it avoids both causalism and finalism, as well as a Platonistic formulation that would conceive it as an “essence outside of time.”⁷ Merleau-Ponty connects this conception to Marcel Proust's characterization of melody, drawing on a metaphor according to which Uexküll (with an explicit reference to the nineteenth-century embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer) states that “the deployment of an Umwelt is a melody, a melody which sings itself.”⁸

On the basis of some pages from the first volume of the Recherche to which we shall later refer,⁹ Merleau-Ponty explains that Marcel Proust characterizes melody as a “Platonic idea which cannot be seen separately” since “it is impossible to distinguish the means and the end, the essence and the existence in it” (N, 228/174). He alludes to the fact that, for the main character of those pages of the Recherche, a peculiar idea of love is incarnated in the sound of a melody—the melody of the petite phrase of Vinteuil's sonata—to such an extent that that idea of love becomes inseparable from Vinteuil's listening.

Merleau-Ponty builds on Uexküll's and Proust's conceptions, and sees in the different manifestations of zoological behaviour the variations in which “the theme of the animal melody” (N, 233/178)¹⁰ finds its expression. More generally, he comes to interpret the crucial question of the relation between parts and whole¹¹—be it the relation between the organs and the organism or between the organism and its territory, or for that matter the links between sexes, or those of individuals with one another and with their species—in terms of “a variable thematism that the animal does not seek to realize by the copy of a model, but that haunts its particular realizations” (ibid.; trans. modified), prior therefore to both causalism and finalism.¹² Actually, as Uexküll nicely said by mentioning “a melody which sings itself,” it is even prior to the distinction between activity and passivity, a distinction in which, if we look thoroughly enough, even the preceding opposition between causalism and finalism finds its roots.

Echoing the concluding sentence of the essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (a true manifesto for the elaboration of the “new ontology”), we might say, therefore, that in the thématisme mentioned above, Merleau-Ponty finds a sui generis teleology, “which is written and thought about in parentheses” (S, 228/181).¹³ In the summary of his first course on Nature, Merleau-Ponty underscores how this teleology, unlike the “proper” one, contributes to the characterization of Nature as “oriented and blind productivity.”¹⁴ The aspect of orientation here—as explained in the notes on Uexküll's framework—should be understood “as something similar to the orientation of our oneiric consciousness toward certain poles that are never seen for themselves, but which are, however, directly the cause for all the elements of a dream” (N, 233/178).

Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that, on this basis, “we shouldn't see, in the very numerous individualities that life constitutes, corresponding separated absolutes, in relation to which every generality would only represent beings of reason [êtres de raison]” (N, 247/189, trans. modified). He explains that, rather, they return “an ontological value back to the notion of species” (ibid.).¹⁵ Yet what does he mean by the “ontological value” of the notion of species? And why does he deem this point so important that he returns to it again and again?¹⁶ Finally, in what sense does returning an ontological value to the notion of species help to delineate the “new ontology” which Merleau-Ponty wants to work out?

III. VOYANCE

We might look for an answer to these questions in the preparatory notes of one of the two courses interrupted by Merleau-Ponty's death. This course bears the title “Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today.” The notes for this course discuss how the experiences of contemporary art and literature converge toward delineating a “new ontology,” and how they serve to specify the features of this new ontology. From these notes emerge the developing lines that Merleau-Ponty wanted to follow in reconsidering, according to this new ontological perspective, the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, i.e., the relation between existence and essence. (To reiterate, Merleau-Ponty considered these lines of development to be operating—even if they are not made philosophically explicit—in contemporary ontology.) The notes are particularly clear in this regard.

At the very centre of these lines of development there appears a notion—thematized at last—which had often, but only implicitly, been present in the later texts of Merleau-Ponty (it is formulated only once in Eye and Mind).¹⁷ This notion is central in reconsidering the relation between the sensible and the intelligible. It is the notion designated by the term voyance.¹⁸

Voyance literally indicates “clairvoyance,” the “gift of double sight,” but, in view of the misunderstandings that might occur if such a notion is given a Platonistic interpretation, we shall continue to use the original French term. In an effort to understand fully the import of this notion, we shall turn to it after briefly reviewing the overall project for the course in which the notion finds its place.

As I have already suggested, the task of this course is to try (in part through a direct contrast with Cartesian ontology) to give a philosophical formulation to contemporary ontology, which—according to Merleau-Ponty—has until now found its expression particularly in art and in literature. The first stop that he envisions for his journey is thus a survey of the landscape of “contemporary ontology,” as it is spontaneously and implicitly delineated in art and in literature: “especially in literature” (NC, 391), he emphasizes at a certain point. This remark is worth noting for those who claim that the last phase of Merleau-Ponty's thought refers exclusively to painting. Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the artistic domain does indeed concentrate on painting, following the path already traced out in Eye and Mind. But when it comes to the recognition of the literary domain, here Merleau-Ponty intends to examine the work of Proust as well as the investigations of Valéry, Claudel, and other authors of the “recent literature” (NC, 191) individuated in Saint-John Perse and in Claude Simon.¹⁹

Although unmentioned in this program, there is another literary reference that assumes a theoretically central position in the definition of the contemporary ontological landscape in Merleau-Ponty's view. This reference is to Arthur Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant. Merleau-Ponty arrives at this reference via a statement by Max Ernst that assimilates the present task of the painter to precisely the task that Rimbaud's manifesto assigns to the poet: “Just as the role of the poet since [Rimbaud's] famous Lettre du voyant consists in writing under the dictation of what is being thought, of what articulates itself in him, the painter's role is to circumscribe and project what is making itself seen within himself.”²⁰ Both have to bring to expression, as it were,—in terms that inevitably recall Uexküll's notion of “a melody which sings itself ”—what following Merleau-Ponty we might call “the passivity of our activity” (VI 274/221), that is the reflexivity of Being itself.

From this perspective, voyance ends up baptizing that “new bond between the writer and the visible” (NC, 190), which Merleau-Ponty sees as enforced by the research he calls “modern” (though we were saying that it should be understood as contemporary) and which according to Merleau-Ponty can rediscover the “Renaissance beyond Descartes” (NC, 175). As he explains, “[t]he moderns rediscover the Renaissance through the magical idea of visibility: it is the thing that makes itself seen (outside and inside), over there and here” (NC, 390). While on the one hand Merleau-Ponty contends that “da Vinci vindicates voyance against poetry” (NC, 183)—which, unlike painting, da Vinci considers to be “incapable of ‘simultaneity’” (NC, 175)—at the same time Merleau-Ponty notes that “moderns make of poetry also a voyance” (NC, 183). Therefore, they show that poetry is indeed “capable of simultaneity.” The frequent effort to bring simultaneity to expression is thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, one of the characteristic traits of contemporary ontology.²¹

At this point Merleau-Ponty departs from Descartes' view of vision. Descartes reduces vision to a kind of thought—a kind of thought that is stimulated by images, in just the way that thought is stimulated by signs and words. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty conjectures that the “unveiling of the ‘voyance’ in modern art—a voyance which is not Cartesian thought—might have [an] analogue in the arts of speech” (NC, 182–183; my emphasis). He suggests that “[p]erhaps, we should, instead of reducing vision to a reading of signs by thought, rediscover in speech, conversely, a transcendence of the same type that occurs in vision” (ibid). Indeed, it is precisely to this that he thinks Rimbaud has contributed in a decisive way.

Voyance—which in the mutual referring of perception and the imaginary, “renders present to us what is absent” (OE, 41/132)—hence characterizes Merleau-Ponty's conception of seeing. As Heidegger reminds us, seeing is not vorstellen, i.e., ‘to represent by frontal positioning’ and, by doing so, ‘to subject.’²² Seeing should instead be regarded as ‘complying with’—a verb which expresses the indistinguishability of activity and passivity. With voyance, we discover that seeing is a complying with the showing of the sensible universe itself, within which we find ourselves and through which runs the power of an...