Merleau-Ponty is arguably one of the pre-eminent twentieth-century philosophers. His work is increasingly regarded as ‘classic’, not in the sense that its relevance is anchored in a remote time, nor that its concerns and strategies are classifiable in terms of a fixed style, but more in the opposite sense that it continues to speak to and challenge philosophers and thinkers today, opening up new paths of investigation. Even in France his work is belatedly experiencing a renaissance. Despite the delayed recognition of his enduring significance by the French Académie, some French philosophers have long championed the importance of his work—notably, Renaud Barbaras, Françoise Dastur, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Étienne Bimbinet to name a few. The extraordinary prescience of his philosophical insights conjoined with the broad range of his engagements spanning not only philosophy but also psychology, aesthetics, politics, physics and the natural sciences has led to a burgeoning recognition of his relevance to diverse fields. Among these are neuroscience, social cognition, dance, developmental psychology, social psychology, critical theory, sports science, aesthetics, artificial intelligence, play, feminist philosophy, language, environmental philosophy and most recently ethics.
Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se; nonetheless, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. In An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work (1962), he wrote that moving from the study of perception to that of expression would not only give a metaphysics but ‘at the same time give us the principle of an ethics’ (Pri.P:11, RMM:409). Furthermore, in the course of his defence of his thesis The Primacy of Perception before the Société Française de Philosophie in support of his candidacy for the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France (1946), he declared that he never considered in all his writings of the subject as anything other than an ethical subject (Pri.P:30; Pri.P:78,79). Although he makes few explicit references to ethics, those that he does offer are highly suggestive and I propose that these allied to his ontological commitments provide the basis for the development of an ethics which is able to challenge the traditional conceptions of ethical theory and practice. Apart from these important explicit references, within all his works, including the aesthetic and political,1 there is an identifiable and persistent ethical current underpinning many of his central concepts and concerns. This book thus aims to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s implicit ethics, which arises out of his relational ontology wherein the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed. Such an ethics would be markedly different from traditional and mainstream ethical accounts, which are founded on the assumptions of dualist or monist ontologies. Because of such ontological foundations, the relations between subjects in the accounts of deontology, utilitarianism, consequentialism, contractarian and virtue ethics are external. We could characterize such ethics as ‘high altitude’ in that they invoke a higher authority than the subject, whether of divine ordinance, duty, utility, consequences, the social good or the valorization of a virtuous ideal. These are the ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, which engage at the level of reflection. Such ethics are able to offer not only justifications for actions and values but also cohesion, guidance and significant harmony within any society; however, adherence to any one requires a certain degree of selective blindness. They cannot capture the complexities of experience and sometimes when rigorously applied lead to abhorrent outcomes or to outcomes essentially antithetical to the chosen ethical telos. As a consequence, the domain of ethics today is characterized by conflict, dogmatism and reductionism.
Merleau-Ponty’s ethics, grounded in the ontological interdependence of subjects within which internal relations obtain, demands an entire reappraisal of ethical questions. The questions that motivate my investigation are the following: What constitutes an ethical subject? What is the real nature of my responsibility for others and our shared world? If their well-being is inherently linked to my own, can I afford to be indifferent, negligent or destructive? How would an ethics of internal relations motivate action? What could this ethics offer to the resolution of seemingly irresolvable ethical problems and dilemmas? Is it possible finally to answer the amoralist, for whom ethical injunctions and ethical intuitions are at worst irrelevant and misguided and at best mere conventional conveniences? Such questions are in urgent need of illumination given the weakening and corruption of many of the traditional cultural structures, whether social, political or religious, which in the past have served to constrain aggression, redress injustices and ameliorate inequities. This urgency is also underscored by the shrinking of our world through info-technology and travel. The citizens of the world can no longer claim ignorance and retire to the comfort of their immediate and personal concerns. In particular, at this time, the Other has come to be most vividly embodied in the refugee and the terrorist. Both inspire profound fear, one because he demands our compassion and our generosity, and the other because he threatens our security and confronts us with an entirely other point of view. The first threatens because he demands recognition as equally deserving of the advantages we enjoy and the second because there is a legitimate basis for resentment in that, whether directly or indirectly, our comforts have often been achieved at the expense of these Others and, moreover, because he neither accepts nor trusts the so-called egalitarian ethos of democracies. And so all the psychological and political mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are set in motion, hurtling inexorably from one disaster to the next, from one outrage to the next, the atrocities escalating, the hearts hardening against each other, failing or refusing to recognize the Other as an-other suffering fellow human being. What is really going on? How do these failures become possible? Why within the general understanding of ourselves, others and the world do these problems appear intractable and inevitably tragic? We could retreat into the easy, reassuring comforts of discrimination against the irredeemable Other or invoke the psychological mechanisms of projection to explain what is happening. I, however, propose that through a careful explication of Merleau-Ponty’s implicit ethics, we can reveal the grounds of such problems.
I propose that we are caught in a primitive2 perception of others and our world which is no longer viable. Just as our perception evolved to be able to accommodate ‘perspective’ and ‘colour’, so too we need to evolve beyond oppositional perception to one that recognizes our deep interdependence. In this way, the failure to recognize this interdependence can be compared to an optical illusion—our distorted perception persists in seeing others as inherently independent, radically separate entities, and it is this failure of insight that grounds and leads to ethical failures. Albert Einstein has made a similar comparison:
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest … a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.3
The project to explicate a Merleau-Pontian ethics thus arises from the ethical questions posed by the Other and begins with perception. It is this which reconfigures the philosophical landscape to enable a new approach. Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitated account of perception conjoined with the many suggestive ideas regarding perceptual intervolvement point towards his implicit ethics. I wish to interrogate these notions in the intersubjective domain, drawing out their implications in order to establish an ethics which is coherent with his overall aims. Although it may be said I am taking liberties with this philosopher’s work, I propose that this is justified in that I can offer sufficient textual support and also these ‘creative liberties’ offer an account with not only explanatory power but also power to galvanize the domain of ethical debate.
I would like to stress here at the outset that seeking norms, obligations and prescriptions is not applicable for this ethics of insight. Some may claim that this does not then qualify as ethics. However, if it motivates skilful action (i.e., action that avoids harming and may in its best manifestations promote the well-being of others), it would be pedantic if not perverse to qualify it as anything other than ethics. And this skilful action is possible by virtue of direct pre-reflective insight, intelligent percipience4 into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation, not on any absolutist formulations, not by virtue of religious prescriptions, nor on principles founded on a metaphysics of man from which rights and duties are extrapolated, nor on the moral accounting typical of consequential or utilitarian ethics.
The Challenges Confronting Other Ethical Accounts
Each of Merleau-Ponty’s major works begins by critically engaging with a provocateur, through which he delineates the problématique which he intends to address through an alternative account. Likewise, I follow a similar strategy, and so my critique of traditional normative ethics, while not intended to be a thoroughgoing critique, both indicates in broad strokes the shortcomings of these accounts and serves as an entrée into the elaboration of the distinctive features of Merleau-Ponty’s implicit ethics.
Within traditional approaches to ethics, it is possible to distinguish three broad trends: deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics. The first depends on a view of human nature according to religion or metaphysics from which are extrapolated notions of purpose, rights, duties and good, and it is these which prescribe or proscribe action; the second aims for an account that avoids religious dogmas and metaphysical assumptions about human nature so as to establish ethical action on the basis of a sought-after ‘good’, whether happiness or preference satisfaction, thereby maximizing overall beneficial consequences; and the third promotes the cultivation of particular qualities or virtues in the individual and proposes that through the cumulative effect of this cultivation, both individual and societal flourishing can be achieved.
The perspicacity of these approaches notwithstanding, that there has been a need to regularly qualify and refine these accounts in order to overcome objections and to better align the outcomes with our ethical intuitions suggests that there is something fundamental missing in the formulations. Before elaborating on this lacuna, I wish first to outline the conflicts and challenges of each of these traditional approaches. In the first approach, traditional deontology, because of the plurality of religious and metaphysical allegiances, it is impossible to establish a universally acceptable ethics. We know all too well that the worst atrocities in human history have been committed and continue to be committed in the name of ‘true gods’, ‘chosen peoples’, a ‘superior’ human destiny or unwavering adherence to absolute principles. Even putting aside the problem of opposing religious or metaphysical allegiances, it is possible that the selfsame individual may experience irresolvable conflicts of duty, and moreover there is the ever-present question about the legitimacy of partiality. Must partiality be eliminated from all ethical considerations, and is it even possible to achieve impartiality? Another criticism of traditional deontology is that foreseeable but unintended harm does not merit reprobation and so too non-action and negligence are not considered culpable. The second approach, of which utilitarianism is the most predominant form, has great intuitive appeal. Not only does it provide a simple formula but it also appears to be offering a solution to the problem of plurality, by bypassing both religious and metaphysical considerations. However, this solution collapses when the following questions are posed. How is it possible to measure happiness for diverse individuals? What is considered beneficial? Who decides? Who can arbitrate when negative consequences for one may represent positive consequences for another? We well know that the utilitarian formula when applied consistently may lead to abhorrent outcomes (such as the various versions of the trolley case, the organ transplant case, the Jim and Pedro case). Moreover, minorities are immediately expendable. And in its strict formulation, it becomes too demanding in that every action must come under utilitarian scrutiny. There is also the need to distinguish between short-term and long-term consequences, and the longer the view, the more difficult it becomes to predict consequences and therefore utility. Furthermore, there is the concern that utilitarianism does not take due account of central ethical notions such as ‘justice’, ‘agency’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘integrity’. In addition to all the above challenges, there is the undeniable fact that utilitarianism crucially depends on the assumptions of an egalitarian motivation and that impartiality is always possible. The third approach, a virtue ethics approach, is without question more compatible with a Merleau-Pontian ethics but nonetheless cannot offer adequate explanations or justifications for why particular virtues should be cultivated and moreover it runs up against problems with the exception to the rule—that is, legitimate/constructive anger or patience/tolerance which colludes in exploitation and violence. Furthermore, there is the assumption that certain qualities and virtues are ‘natural’ for humans to have or value.
All three approaches, without question, have made important contributions to the domain of ethical debate, without which they would have already been relegated to the annals of history. So today, the more refined and qualified versions of these approaches are able to offer more nuanced and sophisticated accounts which escape some of the above-me...