I (Constance) will copy here the post in part 6 of this thread, just after the post I linked second last above:
Constance
Merleau-Ponty was a student of Gurwitsch and later critiqued Gurwitsch's interpretation of Gestalt theory. The following paper clarifies M-P's development of Gestalt theory and recognition of its ontological insight. It is also perhaps the clearest paper I've ever brought to this discussion concerning M-P and his major development of phenomenological philosophy. Reading it would permit substantial progress beyond the failure of communication we've reached in this discussion.
"SENSE-MAKING AND SYMMETRY-BREAKING:
MERLEAU-PONTY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND
DYNAMIC SYSTEMS THEORY"
Noah Moss Brender (McGill University)
Abstract: From his earliest work forward, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop
a new ontology of nature that would avoid the antinomies of
realism and idealism by showing that nature has its own endogenous
sense which is prior to reflection. The key to this new ontology
was the concept of form, which he appropriated from Gestalt
psychology. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to give a positive
characterization of the phenomenon of form which would clarify
its ontological status. Evan Thompson has recently taken up Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach
to cognitive science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic
systems theory and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However,
Thompson does not quite succeed in resolving the ambiguities
in Merleau-Ponty’s account of form. This article builds on an indication
from Thompson in order to propose a new account of form
as asymmetry, and of the genesis of form in nature as symmetrybreaking.
These concepts help us to escape the antinomies of Modern
thought by showing how nature is the autoproduction of a
sense which can only be known by an embodied perceiver.
First several pages of this paper:
"Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to epistemology, which
takes up and extends one of Heidegger’s fundamental insights 1, is
the discovery of a pre-reflective, corporeal relation to the world
which is prior to theoretical knowledge, language, and self-
consciousness, and takes place through the perception and move-
ment of the living body. This is a naturalized epistemology 2, in that
it places knowing back into nature; in order to accomplish this,
however, we must not only revise our concept of knowledge, but
also our concept of nature.3 In particular, Merleau-Ponty argues
that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature
unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine
composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.
If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity.
Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness
that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected
parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying
that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can
only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could
comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find
ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed
gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend.
“Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely
an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that
which faces us, but that which carries us.” (N 4/20; trans. mod.)4
It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemolo-
[2 We could equally call it a naturalized phenomenology. The question of
whether or not phenomenology can be naturalized has been much discussed
of late. See, e.g., Jean Petitot et al., eds., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in
Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Univeristy Press, 1999); Sean Gallagher, “On the Possibility of Naturalizing
Phenomenology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology,
(ed.) D. Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dan Zahavi, “Naturalized
Phenomenology: A Desideratum or a Category Mistake?,” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72 (2013), 23–42.
3 See David Morris, “From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological
Refiguring of Nature,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72
(2013), 317–41. See also Renaud Barbaras, “The Movement of the Living as
the Originary Foundation of Perceptual Intentionality,” in Petitot et al., eds.,
Naturalizing Phenomenology.]
gy—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if
the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves
put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that
transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within
consciousness—a representation or mental construct.5
The problem is for consciousness to reflect on its own emergence
within nature, without projecting the results of this reflection
back into its conditions.6 There must be something for us to
know, some nascent intelligibility in nature that is not placed there
by us—otherwise, knowing would be impossible. But this natural
meaning must not yet be an idea for a consciousness—otherwise,
knowing would already have taken place. For knowledge to be
possible at all, then, nature must have its own endogenous meaning
which is prior to thought.7 As Merleau-Ponty says in the lecture
courses on The Concept of Nature that he gave near the end of his
life, “Nature is what has a sense [sens], without this sense having
been posited by thought. It is the autoproduction of a sense.” (N,
3/19; trans. mod.) Thus Merleau-Ponty transforms epistemological
questions into ontological ones: what is this natural meaning that
is prior to thought, and how do such meanings arise in nature
without being posited by consciousness? How are we to think a
sense that is the source of all thought, but is not itself an idea?
In order to answer these questions, Merleau-Ponty turns to the
natural sciences—not only to criticize them, as his phenomenological
predecessors had 8, but also to learn from them:
'Thus, on the one hand it is necessary to follow the spontaneous
development of the positive sciences by asking whether
man is really reduced to the status of an object here, and on the other
hand we must reconsider the reflexive and philosophical attitude
by investigating whether it really gives us the right to define
ourselves as unconditioned and timeless subjects. It is possible
that these converging investigations will finally lead us to
see a milieu which is common to philosophy and the positive
sciences, and that something like a third dimension opens up,
this side of the pure subject and the pure object, where our activity
and our passivity, our autonomy and our dependence no
longer contradict one another.' (TT, 13)9
The key to this new “dimension,” for Merleau-Ponty, is the concept
of Gestalt 10: a non-synthetic whole that cannot be analyzed into
mutually external parts. Merleau-Ponty appropriates this concept—
which he translates as “form” (forme) or “structure” (structure)—
from the German school of Gestalt psychology. However, he argues
that the Gestalt psychologists have failed to recognize the true
ontological significance of their discovery. In the phenomenon of
form, Merleau-Ponty finds “intelligibility in its nascent state” (SB,
207/223; trans. mod.): a self-organizing whole that is not a machine,
and does not need an intellectual synthesis to constitute it.
Because it is neither a thing nor an idea (SB, 127/138), form
seems to point beyond the old antinomies toward a new ontology.
Everything depends, however, on whether and how it is possible to
think a whole that resists analysis. Form is not reducible to its
parts, but neither is it anything other than those parts. “How then
are we to understand this relation of the totality to its parts? What
status must we give totality?” This question, Merleau-Ponty says,
“is at the center of this course on the idea of Nature and maybe the
whole of philosophy.” (N, 145/194; my emphasis)
Merleau-Ponty’s first—and in some ways most complete—
attempt to articulate a Gestalt ontology can be found in his first
book,
The Structure of Behavior.11 Merleau-Ponty never abandoned
[9 Translation taken from Bernhard Waldenfels, “Perception and Structure in
Merleau-Ponty,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 10, no. 1 (1980), 21.
10 “Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that from the beginning to the end,
Merleau-Ponty was attempting to think the form discovered by Gestalt psychology;
and that in this sense, form takes the place of the ‘thing itself’ to
which the Husserlian precept enjoins us to return: all of Merleau-Ponty’s
descriptions, of behaviour as of the perceived world, are guided and constrained
by the Gestalt.” Renaud Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty et la psychologie de
la forme,” Les Études philosophiques, vol. 57, no. 2 (2001), 151–63, here 151;
my translation.
11 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 21. I am here siding with
Toadvine against commentators who argue that Merleau-Ponty only turned to
ontology toward the end of his life, when he was writing The Visible and the
Invisible, and that this turn constituted a break with his earlier, phenomenological
project. Probably the most influential advocate of the latter reading is
Renaud Barbaras, e.g., in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s
Ontology, (tr.) T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2004).]
this ontology, referring back to this book repeatedly in later works.
However, he was never satisfied with the account of form he had
inherited from Gestalt psychology, which defines it as a whole that
cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. In a working note from
1959, near the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty criticizes this as “a
negative, exterior definition”—it says what form is not, but does
not succeed in explaining what it is. (VI, 204/255) Unfortunately,
Merleau-Ponty died without having discovered the positive account
of form that he was searching for.
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in
The Structure
of Behavior and Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt ontology. Of particular
note are Ted Toadvine’s
Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
(2009), and Evan Thompson’s
Mind and Life: Biology, Phenomenology,
and the Sciences of Mind (2007).12 Toadvine turns to Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology in search of a new philosophical approach to our
present environmental crisis. Thompson takes Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach to cognitive
science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic systems theory
and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However, both Toadvine
and Thompson identify a troubling ambiguity in
The Structure
of Behavior’s account of form and its relation to consciousness—an
ambiguity which stems from Merleau-Ponty’s failure to clarify the
ontological status of form.
In this article, I attempt to resolve this ambiguity by offering a
new account of form which builds on Thompson’s use of concepts
from dynamic systems theory. I begin by summarizing the argument
of the
Structure and explaining the ambiguity that Toadvine
and Thompson identify in it. Next, I discuss Thompson’s appropriation
of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. I argue that Thompson fails to
clarify the ontological status of the Gestalt, and that as a result, his
enactive account of cognition or “sense-making” exhibits the same
ambiguity that troubles Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In Part Three, I
work out the implications of Thompson’s suggestion that natural
forms arise through symmetry-breaking, in order to offer a new
account of form as asymmetry. Finally, I argue that this account
can help us to resolve the ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology,
as well as in Thompson’s account of sense-making.
1. Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt Ontology . . . . .
http://philpapers.org/archive/MOSSAS-2.pdf
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
.
