The Logos of the Sensible World

John Sallis

Description

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents a two-semester lecture course on Maurice Merleau-Ponty given at Duquesne University from 1970 to 1971. Devoted primarily to a close reading of the French philosopher's magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, the course begins with a detailed analysis of The Structure of Behavior. The central topics considered in the lectures include the functions of the phenomenological body; beyond realism and idealism; the structures of the lived world; spatiality, temporality, language, sexuality; and perception and knowledge. Sallis illuminates Merleau-Ponty's first two works and offers a thread to follow through developments in his later essays. Merleau-Ponty's notion of the primacy of perception and his claim that "the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning" are woven throughout the lectures. For Sallis's part, these lectures are foundational for his extended engagement with Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, which was published in Sallis's Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings.

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• John Sallis
• Sallis
• Indiana University Press
• Phenomenology
• IUP
• Environment
• French
• Institut universitaire professionnalisé
• ART
• Perception
• Lecture
• Science
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253040466
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE LOGOS OF THE SENSIBLE WORLD
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOHN SALLIS
Volume III/10
THE LOGOS OF THE SENSIBLE WORLD
Merleau-Ponty s Phenomenological Philosophy

John Sallis

Edited by Richard Rojcewicz
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by John Sallis
Based on the lecture course of 1970-71
at Duquesne University,
with supplementary material from
the lecture course of 1968-69 at Duquesne University.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04044-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04045-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04048-0 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
Contents

Key to the Citations of Merleau-Ponty s Works

Introduction
I. The Structure of Behavior

A. Introduction

B. Chapter 1 of The Structure of Behavior : Reflex Behavior

C. Chapter 2 of The Structure of Behavior : Higher Forms of Behavior

D. Chapter 3 of The Structure of Behavior : The Physical Order, the Vital Order, the Human Order

E. Chapter 4 of The Structure of Behavior : The Relations of the Soul and the Body and the Problem of Perceptual Consciousness
II. Phenomenology of Perception

A. The Preface of the Phenomenology of Perception

B. The Introduction of the Phenomenology of Perception : Traditional Prejudices and the Return to the Phenomena

C. Part One of the Phenomenology of Perception : The Body
i. Prologue. Experience and Objective Thought. The Problem of the Body
ii. Chapter 1. The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology
iii. Chapter 3. The Spatiality of the Body Proper and Motility
iv. Chapter 5. The Body as a Sexed Being
v. Chapter 6. The Body as Expression; Speech

D. Part Two of the Phenomenology of Perception : The Perceived World
i. Introduction. The Theory of the Body Is Already a Theory of the Perceived World
ii. Chapter 1. Sense Experience
iii. Chapter 2. Space
iv. Chapter 3. The Thing and the Natural World
v. Interlude: Review and Preview
vi. Chapter 4. Other People and the Human World

E. Part Three of the Phenomenology of Perception : Being-for-Itself and Being-in-the-World
i. Chapter 1. The C ogito
ii. Chapter 2. Temporality
iii. Chapter 3. Freedom

Editor s Afterword
Index
Key to the Citations of Merleau-Ponty s Works
T HE WORKS OF Merleau-Ponty will be cited according to the following abbreviations, succeeded by the page number of the published English translation and then of the original. The translations quoted in the text are occasionally modifications of the published ones.
HT: Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , tr. John O Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le probl me communiste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
IP: In Praise of Philosophy , tr. John Wild and James Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963. loge de la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.
PP: Phenomenology of Perception , tr. Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. Ph nom nologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
PR: The Primacy of Perception, tr. James Edie. In The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Le primat de la perception et ses cons quences philosophiques. Grenoble: Cynara, 1989. Originally published in the Bulletin de la soci t fran aise de philosophie , Dec. 1947, pp. 119-53.
S: Signs , tr. Richard McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
SB: The Structure of Behavior , tr. Alden Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942.
SN: Sense and Non-Sense , tr. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Sens et non-sens. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
TL: Themes from the Lectures at the Coll ge de France , tr. John O Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. R sum s de cours Coll ge de France 1952-1960. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
VI: The Visible and the Invisible , tr. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Le visible et l invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
THE LOGOS OF THE SENSIBLE WORLD
Introduction
T HE END OF a philosophy is the account of its beginning. So says Merleau-Ponty in one of the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible (VI 177, 231).
If we set out to expound and interpret Merleau-Ponty s philosophy, his statement about end and beginning immediately poses a difficulty. For it means we cannot set out by establishing and justifying the starting point of his thought. We cannot simply set this down and then straightforwardly proceed to unfold his philosophy in terms of a logical development from the starting point.
Merleau-Ponty s philosophy is rather one which moves in a circle and does so in a very profound way. In play here is not the circularity of logical argumentation, the kind of circularity it would be appropriate to want to get rid of. It is rather a circularity arising out of Merleau-Ponty s reflection on the very character of philosophical thought, a circularity which to that extent is akin to the circularity of the Hegelian system and to the hermeneutical circle of Heidegger.
Yet, if we cannot begin by establishing a starting point, it is almost equally inappropriate to begin with a sketch or general outline of Merleau-Ponty s philosophy. The very character of his work is such as to resist the attempt at a summarizing overview. Consider, for example, what Merleau-Ponty says in The Metaphysical in Man from Sense and Non-Sense : Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of everyday experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as all settled, as consequences with no premises, and as if they were self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing. . . . Understood in this way, metaphysics is the opposite of a system (SN 94, 165-66).
What I want to attempt as an introduction to Merleau-Ponty is thus not an overview of a supposed system of thought. Rather, I want to examine how Merleau-Ponty s work arises out of an engagement with his contemporary historical and philosophical situation and in that way try to obtain a first glimpse of his problematic.
Today it has become almost the fashion to say that philosophers must be engaged, that they must be involved in the contemporary situation, that their thinking must proceed in response to the issues their situation raises for them. Merleau-Ponty is in agreement with this notion of philosophy; one could perhaps even regard the whole of his work as an extended effort to understand the sense of this engagement and the source of its necessity.
At the same time, the result of his work is to refine the notion of engagement, even to the point where it begins to look like something quite different from what we might usually think. Merleau-Ponty comes to see that the engagement of the philosopher is an engagement permeated with ambiguity. It is an engagement which is simultaneously a withdrawal, a disengagement: One must be able to step back to be capable of true engagement. . . . That the philosopher limps behind is his virtue. True irony is not an alibi; it is a task and is the detachment which assigns the philosopher a certain kind of action among men (IP 60-61, 70-71). This sort of ambiguous or dialectical engagement is concretely evident in Merleau-Ponty s own career.
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908. He grew up mostly in Paris and was educated at L cole normale sup rieure. It was there that he first met Sartre, with whom he was to have an important and lifelong association.
After Merleau-Ponty graduated with the equivalent of an MA in 1930, he spent five years teaching in a lyc e, first at Beauvais, then at Chartres. In 1935 he returned to teach at L cole normale. Then the war broke out, and in 1939 he entered the army. During the Occupation he worked (together with Sartre) in the resistance movement and wrote his first two books: The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception .
After the war, he defended those two works to receive his doctorate from L cole normale and became professor at the University of Lyon. In 1950 he came to the Sorbonne as Professor of Psychology and Pedagogy (teaching mainly child psychology). Then in 1952 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in the Coll ge de France. The chair to which he was appointed had previously been held by Louis Lavelle and Henri Bergson. It is perhaps the highest philosophical position in France, and Merleau-Ponty was the youngest philosopher ever to occupy it.
The most important document regarding the concrete course of Merleau-Ponty s career is an essay Sartre published