If you’re a fan of Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, or Levinas (or all three together) then Duquesne University is the place to be in 2013. Duquesne will host the following events:
Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy (Schelling and Naturphilosophie), August 5-9
North American Levinas Society, July 28-31
Merleau-Ponty Circle, September 26-28
Awhile back I wondered aloud about where the new translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was. Well, the Routledge table had a few copies on sale at the APA Eastern, so it exists in some bound form (at least in some minimal quantity) and Amazon.com has it available for pre-order, which I did a few days ago. You can get your hands on the Donald Landes translation for $30 (rather than $50) here.
(Note that this post is historically relative–price subject to increase without notice.)
According to a message on Routledge’s Twitter page, the new translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception will be out later this month.
Yesterday I finally made it to McConnells Mill state park, where I enjoyed a spectacular 12.4 mile hike on the most pleasant day of this September. The hike, which follows the Western side of the Slippery Rock Gorge, begins at Hell’s Hollow and terminates at Eckert Bridge (below). I took this picture while having lunch in the creek (safely atop a rock).
At one point during the hike, I was moving at a pretty swift pace. At a small stream crossing I planted my foot on a large rock situated at roughly a 45 degree angle. The rock was damp and I immediately felt unsure of my footing, so I froze. In an instant my body registered its uncertainty and took stock of its position, and as I stared intently at my foot I was made aware of three options. Now, as I stared–and I should say that all of this exhibits the kind of knowledge, or ‘practical competence’, discussed by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception–my mind was pretty much empty. It was too fixated on my foot to think, but nevertheless my body knew the condition it faced. As I am a relatively experienced hiker, I kept my footing and avoided an immediate spill. Such is the nature of my habit body. The three possibilities my body faced were: 1) attempt to move ahead, apply too much pressure and risk slipping; 2) lean backward and disengage the rock; 3) maintain a balance that would enable my body to remain on the rock and eventually step forward. Sensing that the risk of slippage was too great in #1 and #3, I ‘chose’ #2. It was an act of corporeal wisdom.
In one respect, this picture represents the body as an ‘I can’, a competent and able body that is well-adjusted to its environment and capable of dealing with its demands. But on the other hand, one must also see the body in this situation as compelled by an imperative that is commanded by the environment. Lingis is getting at something like this in The Imperative (pp. 67-8), when he writes:
The imperative in our environment is received, not on our understanding in conflict with our sensuality, but on our postural schema which integrates our sensibility and mobilizes our motor forces. It is received on our sensory-motor bodies as bodies we have to center upon things that orient our movements, bodies we have to anchor on the levels down which our vision, our touch, our listening move, on which we station ourselves and move in the heart of reality. It orders our competence.
Yes, as I stood frozen on the rock I was ‘anchoring’ myself; I had to. In that moment, on the rock, it was the rock that dictated my body’s orientation. This is not to say that I was at the total mercy of the rock, for I did not succumb directly to its slick and unpredictable surface. But I must admit that my body was caught somewhere between and ‘I can’ and an ‘I can’t', which played out as a negotiation between the imperative of the trail and the know-how of my postural schema.
Via the Continental Philosophy Bulletin Board, here’s some audio (taken from YouTube) of Merleau-Ponty discussing sensible objects. The audio is in French, but there are English subtitles included.
In anticipation of reading some stuff by Andy Clark and Alva Noe, I picked up George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society. Only a few pages in, the connections with Merleau-Ponty are already emerging. This is not surprising, given that both Mead and MP (in The Structure of Behavior) are setting up their psychology in opposition to the behaviorist method. In Mead’s case, he’s interested less in rejecting or supplanting behaviorism than amending/extending the behaviorist approach to behavior. I hope to make some posts on what I find in Mead. It was nice to see a few books already extant on the connection between Mead and continental philosophy, as well as this one by Sandra Rosenthal and Patrick Bourgeois, called Mead and Merleau-Ponty. Like I said, if you’ve read Merleau-Ponty, it only takes a few pages of Mead to get the idea to write a book on their similarities.
Here’s the information for my APA Central talk.
Several years ago we caught wind of a new translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which was undertaken by Sean Kelly. He was blogging about the experience here until the blog went defunct. If I remember correctly, there were some heavy critical comments made in the commentary section and then he stopped making his progress public.
Does anyone know when the new translation is set to appear, and if Kelly is still the translator?
I can’t recall right now (and I don’t feeling like looking it up) where Merleau-Ponty says that objects, or their sense, meet our gaze with a ‘vague beckoning’? He also uses the term ‘solicitation’ at places to denote how object attract us and draw us into a ‘communion’ with them. At a couple points in the Phenomenology he speaks about sense experience as an assault or assailing of the body, which is language he adopts directly from Erwin Straus’s The Primary World of Senses.
Realism hinges on the question of whether or not objects assail us. If we think they merely beckon us, then the idea that subject and object reciprocally determine each other’s form seems plausible. That is, a certain postdualist idealism/irrealism may be right. But if objects assail us with their qualities or with sensations, then there is something to be said about their autonomy from our perceptual or cognitive machinery.
Recently Crispin Sartwell expressed his sympathies with the Speculative Realism movement. Now, a critic at Minds and Brains has called into question the very legitimacy and ‘maturity’ of SR. Harman replies to the critic here, and I want to echo a couple of Harman’s points.
Minds and Brains seems to be suggesting that SR’s overcoming of what Sartwell calls the ‘Kantian Nightmare’ is nothing new at all. He basically asks us to present a single figure in the twentieth century who actually denies the existence of the external world (a la Berkeley, presumably). Since no one does, presumably, realism has actually been alive and well. Harman answers this point sufficiently by pointing to the number of respondents he deals with who actually find it ‘naive’ to believe in autonomous objects. He adds the following about Merleau-Ponty:
Take Merleau-Ponty, for instance. There are good aspects to M.-P., but contrary to popular belief, he is not an especially original ontologist. Merleau-Ponty says the world looks at me just as I look at it. But that’s the very definition of correlationism. You don’t “overcome Kant” by saying that human and world always go together rather than being separate, you have to do it by no longer treating human and world as the two poles that are always in question.
Right, he’s not an original ontologist. He’s basically a quasi-dualist in the Phenomenology and a monist in The Visible and the Invisible. Sure, these are interesting instantiations of monism and dualism, but not unprecedented. There’s something Cartesian about the early text; something Spinozan about the latter. Perhaps the methodological steps are unique, but the outcome is readily inscribable into the history of philosophy.
As to the point about not denying the existence of the external world, it’s necessary to insist on this point: it is not enough just to believe in or subscribe to the existence of mind-independent objects. One must also prove they exist, or at least speculate about their existence. If one has ruled out the legitimacy of such speculation, which Kant seems very close to doing in his critique of reason, then it becomes in a sense hypocritical to posit the noumenal realm. Hegel saw this, of course, and that’s one of the reasons he wrote the Phenomenology. You can’t spill all of your ink arguing for a kind of idealism, and then simply utter your allegiance to realism as if nothing has changed. If you want your realism, then you have to earn it. The post-Kantian world is a place where it is expensive, and for a long time unfashionable, to work for realism.
