U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Some Thinking About Things in Bad Times

Editor's Note

Today, like so many of our number, I’m fumbling around with questionable “courseware” and doing my best to figure it all out. This means, also, like many others, I’m busier than I thought imaginable as I make the transition. So I thought, since I tend to post about the class I teach with a philosopher, I’d just post here what we’re calling “podcasts” of our discussions of Merleau-Ponty for our class with one another. These five discussions all have to do with a single chapter: Part Two, Chapter Three of The Phenomenology of Perception, “The Thing and the Natural World.” Our copy is the Donald A. Landes translation published by Routledge first in 2012.

We started with some riffing in the first discussion to prime the pump a little. (Remember that we’ve been in this here book for several weeks already. If you’ve not already been following this series, I’d suggest catching up. It will make much more sense if you do).

We then went on to answer four questions:

 

  1. How does Merleau-Ponty account for size and color, and how is his account different from “Empiricist” and “Intellectualist” accounts?
  2. What is a “thing” in his account and what makes it “real”
  3. How and in what ways does Mo think “The World” is open and unfinished?
  4. Finally, what is Mo’s account of hallucinations and how does it differ from “Empiricist” and “Intellectualist” accounts?

Our students, as we speak, are having online discussions about these questions. My pal Andy explains this in the first one of these.

Enjoy? Times are hard these days. Maybe this will help. It helped us.

4 Thoughts on this Post

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  1. There’s a line in one of Wordsworth’s poems: “We murder to dissect.” Compare what Andy says about dissection in the first podcast here. Someone has probably (?) already drawn the connection between M-P and the Romantic poets, but I’m guessing. (That Wordsworth poem probably reads as a more direct attack on, or critique of, science or a scientific worldview than anything M-P wrote, but again, guessing.)

    • Hi Louis.

      I suspect someone has done that with the Romantic poets. I don’t know much about the scholarship around Merleau-Ponty (yet), but I can see the connection you’re suggesting here. As far as the critique of scientific thinking goes, I do think Merleau-Ponty is generally critical. This probably dates it in some ways, in that I sometimes think he can be too hard on science, which is often at the center of the two positions he goes against, the empiricist and intellectualist positions. The empiricist take is clear enough. But the intellectualist (mostly Kantian) perspective is important for science too, because it shows ways that, owing to how the mind’s categories order reality, we can be confident in this ordering of the world because how the world hangs together for us, say geometrical notions or universals and so on, demonstrate it.

      The late 40s are different from today, for example, so it has a certain historical context there. I can say that, plenty of times, we find ourselves tempering some of those anti-scientific judgments of his. I suppose what I would say, working out of his insights, that science can tell us lots of really useful things about the world. Its explanations or its causes, can tell us a great deal. We need science, obviously more than ever. But I think Mo would say that only tells us so much and it certainly doesn’t tell us what it’s like to be in the world–the “now-ness” of the now or the thing-ness of things–and so on. His point is, like others in the tradition, that we have to start from how we actually experience the world. After all, there’s a world before science, a primordial experience, or the “original faith in the world” of which science is just a part. He wants to make it bigger, more expansive. So yeah, poetry makes sense in this. Experience is a kind of poetry, because we gather up our being-in-the-world at each moment, what might be called the always-everywhere-taking-up-the-before-in-the-always-coming-up. So, this is what someone like, as far as poets, John Ashbery does really well. I’ve been reading and listening to his stuff while reading this book and it helps for some odd reason.

      Man, thanks so much for listening. I appreciate it so much. I mean that.

      • Pete,
        Thank you for the helpful reply. To be honest, I only listened to the first one (most of it), but that was enough to tell that the two of you have a good conversational rapport and enjoy teaching together and are good at it.

        Haven’t read much Ashbery (and no particular lines stick in my memory) but I think I get the connection there.

  2. This was a great post, Pete. Thanks for sharing. I have really enjoyed these MP posts and have just ordered a copy of PoP.

    This speak of poetry reminds me, I was reading some Rorty on Heidegger and he mentions Heidegger didn’t see philosophy (i.e. all Western philosophy until him) as a pseudo-science, but more so bad poetry.

    He also quotes Heidegger (in his essay, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism”): “Being’s poem, just begun, is man.” This idea that we and our being-in-the-world is the first stanza of Being. It’s a lovely sort of way of putting things.

    And one more, here’s a little more from the same essay I found particularly enjoyable and apropos to what you’ve been getting at (to a degree):

    “…we have to think of the West not as the place where human beings finally got clear on what was really going on, but as just one cherry blossom alongside actual and possible others, one cluster of ‘understandings of Being’ alongside other clusters. But we also have to think of it as the blossom which WE [italicized by Rorty] are. We can neither leap out of our blossom into the next one down the bough, nor rise above the tree and look down at a cloud of blossoms (in the way in which we imagine God looking down on a cloud of galaxies). For Heideggers’s purposes, we are nothing save the words we use, nothing but an (early) stanza of Being’s poem. Only a metaphysician, a power freak, would think we were more.”

    Incidentally, Rorty goes on to explain that this view (in Heidegger’s eyes) is not a History of Human Beings Understanding of Being, but a History of Being itself.

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