Merleau-Ponty’s “True Cogito” Allen Porter
Abstract In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes many radically anti-Cartesian statements, and even goes so far as to propose his own revisionary reinterpretation of Descartes’ famous Cogito that he calls both a “new Cogito” and “the true Cogito”. This paper attempts, first, to give an explicatory close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s text concerning this “true Cogito”, and second, to assess its philosophical significance in light of the presented understanding.
Keywords: Maurice Merleau-Ponty ⋅ Descartes ⋅ Continental Philosophy ⋅ Phenomenology ⋅ Existentialism
Allen Porter Rice University, Houston, TX, USA email:
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I In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes the radically anti-Cartesian statement that “The difference between illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perception can only be read in perception itself ”, and he talks in this context of a “new” or “true” cogito (PP 310). What is the meaning of this? The answer is that Merleau-Ponty intends to provide a new cogito for a new kind of philosophy, one (phenomenological, existential) which is critical of the Cartesian philosophy and its legacy. We are familiar with Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian Cogito, which is essentially that Descartes failed to work out or clarify “the unexpressed ontological foundations of the ‘cogito sum’”—specifically, by leaving “undetermined[…] the kind of Being which belongs to the res cogitans, or—more precisely—the meaning of the Being of the ‘sum’” (BT 46)—and this is so “even though it [the sum] is regarded as no less primordial than the cogito” (BT 71). In other words (and still in Heideggerian terms), Descartes fails to question the Being or way of Being of the ego of the cogito—indeed, as we all know, he proposes and/or presupposes (and thereby predisposes his inheritors) that the ego is res cogitans a la res extensa: thinking/mental substance. So if Merleau-Ponty is going to provide a new cogito “for” phenomenological philosophy (this “for” will have to have a different sense too, of course), he will have to avoid Descartes’s mis-take or myopia. In the Cartesian Cogito, the “I” is myopically qualified solely as “cogitans” via the cogito (i.e. by the situation of selfreflective thought it currently finds itself in), and this uncritically or automatically determines or qualifies the meaning of the “sum”. But the essential or primordial mode of being of the subject cannot be presumed to be that of thinker, nor even that of being-in-the-world in the mode of thinking-subject, for that matter. As Merleau-Ponty says, “Reflection, which holds things at a distance, at least discovers itself as given to itself in the sense that it cannot conceive of itself as eliminated, it cannot hold itself at a distance from itself. But this does not mean that reflection and thought are primitive facts that are simply observed” (PP 420). The meaning of the “sum” will thus have to be phenomenologically “clarified”—ultimately, as existence in the sense given to this term in phenomenology and existentialism—and this will then inform the meaning of the “I” that “is”. The definitive statement of Merleau-Ponty’s new cogito is the first sentence of the extensive final paragraph of the final chapter (“Space”) of Part Two (“The Perceived World”) of The Phenomenology of Perception: “And yet there is consciousness of something, something appears, there is a phenomenon—such is the true cogito” (PP 310). While he devotes an entire later chapter to “The Cogito” in Part III, this single paragraph condenses (“condenses”—the paragraph is quite extensive, as we will see) Merleau-Ponty’s full critique of Descartes’s Cogito from the perspective of the latter’s phenomenological improvement and/or alternative. Focusing especially on these loci in the text, we will ultimately seek to understand how the new cogito can ground the claim about perceptual truth/illusion, on the one hand (Part III), and how it relates to its Cartesian precursor in terms of philosophical status and ambition, on the other (Part IV); but first we must explicate it itself (Part II). II Again, the definitive formulation: “And yet there is consciousness of something, something appears, there is a phenomenon—such is the true cogito”. It would be far too hasty to simply interpret this as essentially a reduction of “I think, therefore I exist” to “there is experience”—besides the fact that the meaning of that transformation and those new words would need to be unpacked and clarified. The sentence is in fact an aphorism, and the surface or super-ficial nucleus an aphorism presents—which in this case could be reformulated as: “there is consciousness”, but consciousness is always “of something” for phenomenology, so
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this something is therefore an appearance for consciousness, or rather is “a phenomenon” in the strictly phenomenological sense—is only the threshold or entryway into the secret (latent but not hidden) world of meaning that “the aphorism” itself is. In entering through the final, summary formulation, i.e. “there is a phenomenon”, we presuppose on the part of the reader (and, more originally, on the part of the writer) a modicum of familiarity with this term, “phenomenon”, in terms of the status and sense given to it in the phenomenological tradition (in decreasing order of proximity: Heidegger, Husserl, …). This is so that we may stick more closely to Merleau-Ponty’s text and the specificity of his thought. Now, at the outset of his book, Merleau-Ponty makes an essential link between the notion of phenomenon and another—namely, sense [sens]: “Each part announces more than it contains, and thus this elementary perception is already charged with a sense” (PP 4). When Merleau-Ponty says this, it is in the midst of phenomenologically “[c]onsidering a white patch against a homogeneous background”, arguing against certain traditional views that Gestalt theory’s claim that “a figure against a background is the most basic sensible given we can have” is in fact “the very definition of the perceptual phenomenon, or that without which a phenomenon cannot be called perception” (PP4). What is sense [sens, Sinn]? We will also have to presuppose a modicum of familiarity with the understanding(s) of “intentionality” in the phenomenological tradition, including its essential relation to sense and meaning; to say that Husserlian intentionality is taken up by Heidegger and made (into) practical (intentionality), and that Heideggerian practical intentionality is in turn taken up by MerleauPonty and made (into) embodied (practical intentionality)—to say this would be a gross oversimplification at best, but it indicates the region(s) of familiarity presupposed. Now let us continue with Merleau-Ponty. The passage about the perception of the white patch on the black background (PP 4) provides us a concrete entry into Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of sense, and thereby into the sense of the phenomenon: Consider a white patch against a homogeneous background. All points on the patch have a certain common “function” that makes them into a “figure”. The figure’s color is denser and somehow more resistant than the background’s color. The borders of the white patch “belong” to the patch and, despite being contiguous with it, do not join with the background. The patch seems to be placed upon the background and does not interrupt it. Each part announces more than it contains, and thus this elementary perception is already charged with a sense. (PP 4)
Essentially, Merleau-Ponty is making the distinction between what have, on the one hand, been called variously motivational or intentional or normative relations, and, on the other, explanatory or causal or factual relations (cf. Z 186). The “function” that makes all the points of the patch into a “figure” is not the same as the geometrical or physical function(s) that makes the same points into a geometrical or physical shape—the latter kind of relation(s), mathematizable and causally explanatory, are phenomenologically inappropriate for describing the kind of being that the perceptual subject is qua embodied being-in-theworld. Merleau-Ponty thus is not speaking of an “objective” function or “objective” figure in this sense, he is speaking rather of a perceptual (and ultimately existential) function and figure—and, moreover, in the context of a phenomenology of perception that attempts to clarify the very foundations upon which the aforementioned “scientific” concepts, methods, and ways of thinking rest and which they presuppose (have left unclarified). Our immediate concern is with the notion of “sense”, so we should look closely at the last sentence of this passage and inquire into the “thus” that appears therein. What does it mean to say that each part—of the perceptual phenomenon (as opposed to, e.g., the phenomenon as physical object of natural science)
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—“announces more than it contains”, and thus “this elementary perception”, namely of the phenomenon in question, is “already charged with” a sense? Well, what exactly is “announced” by each intentional part of the perceptual phenomenon? What is the “more than it contains”? Phenomenologically, each intentional “part” of this perceptual phenomenon, such as the “density” of the patch’s color (irreducibly non-mathematizable), is a node in a knot of intentional implications, and it entertains particular motivational relations with each of the other intentional nodes it is related to to—“nodes” such as the “resistance” of the background’s color, or the spatial continuity of this whole, or the way a curvical-linear “outline” is only implied by the borders of the patch in their “belongingness” to it qua figure. Each intentional part relates to the others motivationally—relative to perception—rather than causally: not only is it the case that the “scientific attitude” cannot even get a grip on the peculiar “belongingness” of the borders of the patch to the patch mentioned here, but even when I simply (“am moved to”) move my visual focus from, say, the patch to the background, this “movement” of perceptual consciousness cannot be explained in terms of a causal trajectory or a geometrical representation or model thereof (because it has a “reason” that motivates me in my freedom, not a “reason” that would explain the necessity of my movement). To say that each part of the perceptual phenomenon motivationally “announces” its intentional relations to each and all of the other “nodes” means that it “offers” me the possibility of perceptually moving to them—that it offers a particular (motivational-intentional rather than causal-explanatory) “reason” in each case, but that it is also in its offering-to-me open to them all (so that, e.g. given “external” factors like my current personal situation, I am free to choose which one I move to, though of course some will “move me”—in the sense of drawing or attracting me—more than others). In other words, this particular part of the perceptual phenomenon “announces” its intentional horizon, even solicits me to explore it—an exploration that, once started with a part of a perceptual phenomenon, can end or rather end up in (in the sense of “find itself in”—and there is a double sense to these words, “find itself in”) in the world as a whole (cf. PP 428, block-quoted below in Part III). It is important to note that for a perceptual phenomenon as such (as a knot of motivational relations or intentional implications in the weave of the world) to have sense as such (i.e. to be able to be perceived as having “a sense” or as being “as” something, e.g. the sense of a white patch on a black background)—such that some perception of it can (indeed must) be “already” charged or invested with “a sense”—the motivational implications involved cannot be arbitrary. For example, for the perceptual phenomenon of the patch on the background to be perceived as that, the intentional relation between, say, the color of the patch and the color of the background—the way I can “move” my perceptual consciousness from a focus on the one to a focus on the other—must be specific to the phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty explicates this specificity or intrinsic orientedness or directedness of sense in an analysis of facial recognition, in the course of which he invokes the double sense of “sens", i.e. meaning and direction: My gaze, which scans the face and which has its preferred directions of moving, must only recognize the face if it encounters the details in a certain irreversible order; the very sense of the object—in this case, the face and its expressions—must be connected to its orientation, as is shown clearly enough through the double meaning of the word sense [sens]. Turning an object upside down strips it of its signification. Its being as an object is thus not a being-for-the-thinking-subject, but rather a being-for-the-gaze that encounters it from a certain angle or otherwise fails to recognize it. This is why each object has ‘its’ top and ‘its’ bottom, which for a given level indicate its ‘natural’ place, the place that it ‘should’ occupy. To see a face is […] to have a certain hold on [the object], to be able to follow a certain perceptual itinerary along its surface, with its ups
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and downs. And if I take this route in the reverse direction [sens], it is just as unrecognizable as is the mountain up which I just struggled when I turn to descend with long strides. (PP 264)
Each (particular) perceptual object, as such (as that object and not some other), is always-already oriented in its “existential space”, or in the space of sense (“the world”), the same way that each perceptual subject, as such (as that subject, a la Heideggerian Da-sein), is always-already oriented in “its” existential space that is also the “world”, or that is the particular worldly “situation” into which the embodied subject is alwaysalready “thrown” and “taking up” a “position” in. The equiprimordiality and sensical interlocking of the perceptual subject and its world will continue to be themes, but for now, the key is to understand that the sense of a perceptual phenomenon is the affordance it offers for a certain kind of “hold” for perception—a “hold” in the sense of a rock-climber’s “holds”: the rock-climber who only “takes up” a particular grip or position insofar as it offers a particular possibility for “moving on” to another (the rock-climber does not “see” a particular potential grip or position as some sort of thing “in itself ”, but rather its very sense for the climber—this “as”—is the particular way it affords the possibility of moving to it “in-order-to” move on from it “for-the-sake-of ” the climb). This is why Merleau-Ponty claims to be able to “understand motricity unequivocally as original intentionality”: Consciousness is not originally an ‘I think that’, but rather an ‘I can’. […] Vision and movement [i.e. corporeal movement] are specific ways of relation to objects and, if a single function is expressed throughout all of these experiences, then it is the movement of existence, which does not suppress the radical diversity of contents, for it does not unite them by placing them all under the domination of an ‘I think’, but rather by orienting them toward the inter-sensory unity of a ‘world’. Movement is not a movement in thought, and bodily space is not a space that is conceived or represented. (PP 139)
And we could take further examples from the other “senses” (in the sense of perceptual faculties), e.g. the tactile—for instance, the way a cup has to afford certain specific ways that I can touch it, move my hand on/around it, both if it is to be a cup and if it is to be that cup—in order to further clarify Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of “sense”. But in fact we already have what we need with the phrase “movement of existence” in the just-quoted passage: “Beneath all of these meanings of the word sens [e.g. the sense of a sentence, of vision, etc.], we find the same fundamental notion of a being who is oriented or polarized toward what he is not; and so we are always led to a conception of the subject as ek-stase and to a relation of active transcendence between the subject and the world” (PP 454). The etymological roots of “transcendence” are Latin (the philosophical roots are, in order of decreasing proximity: Heidegger, Husserl, …): trans + scandere = to climb across/over/beyond. We can see how this accords with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perceptual transcendence as the intentional “hold” a perceptual subject “takes up” in a “situation” in order to be able to (continue to) “move” through the “world” of phenomena. This is existence in the Heideggerian sense, the ek-static transcendence that is being-in-theworld. So the new cogito could also be formulated simply as “I exist”, where the “I” is now qualified by the only other term, namely “existence” in the sense of the ek-static transcendence of embodied being-in-theworld. We can flesh this out further while attending to our two remaining tasks: clarifying how this new cogito, thusly understood, grounds such anti-Cartesian claims as “The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what it is to perceive” (PP 4) and “The difference between illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perception can only be read in perception itself ” (PP 310)—and comparing this new cogito to its Cartesian precursor in terms of their philosophical status and ambitions.
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III Now we are ready to understand Merleau-Ponty’s explication of how perception grounds or exhibits its own reliability in its capacity to enable the perceiving subject to distinguish between truth and error, as well as why it is susceptible to error in the first place. This will all (fairly explicitly, with the punctuality of an implicit dialog) be in stark contrast to Descartes, who wanted to assure the certainty of (clear and distinct) perception, and, presuming this accomplished by the arguments of the Meditations (and, specifically, as ultimately grounded in the certainty of the Cogito), thus had to interpolate something transcendent, namely judgment, in order to explain the possibility of perceptual error: This new cogito, because it is prior to revealed truth and error, makes them both possible. The lived is, of course, lived by me; I am not unaware of the feelings that I repress and in this sense there is no unconsciousness. But I can live more things than I can represent to myself, my being is not reduced to what of myself explicitly appears to me. What is only lived is ambivalent; there are feelings in me to which I do not give a name, and also false joys to which I am not entirely committed. The difference between illusion and perception is intrinsic, and the truth of perception can only be read in perception itself. If I believe I see a large flat stone, which is in reality a patch of sunlight, far ahead on the ground in a sunken lane, I cannot say that I ever see the flat stone in the sense in which I will see the patch of sunlight while moving closer. The flat stone only appears, like everything that is far off, in a field whose structure is confused and where the connections are not yet clearly articulated. In this sense, the illusion, like the image, is not observable, that is, my body is not geared into it and I cannot spread it out before myself through some exploratory movements. And yet, I am capable of omitting this distinction, and I am capable of illusion. It is not true that, if I hold myself to what I truly see, I never make an error, nor is it true that sensation, at least, is indubitable. Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense, inserted into a confused or clear configuration, and there is no sensible given that remains the same when I pass from the illusory stone to the true patch of sunlight. The evidentness of sensation entails that of perception, and would render illusion impossible. I see the illusory stone in the sense that my entire perceptual and motor field gives to the light patch the sense of a ‘stone on the lane’. And I already prepare to sense this smooth and solid surface beneath my foot. This is because correct vision and illusory vision are not distinguished in the manner of adequate thought and inadequate thought: that is, in the manner of an absolutely full thought and an incomplete thought. I say that I perceive correctly when my body has a precise hold on the spectacle, but this does not mean that my hold is ever complete; it could only be complete if I had been able to reduce all of the object’s interior and exterior horizons to the state of articulated perception, which is in principle impossible. (PP 310-11)
The overarching point in this anti-Cartesian diatribe is twofold (the first fold of which becomes more explicit as this expansive paragraph—the one that opens with the definitive statement of the new cogito— continues, as we shall see). First, it is that because the “sum” is clarified as embodied being-in-the-world, the world is given equiprimordially with the “I”. As Heidegger says much later (in 1963), “In the customary, psychological representation of the ‘I’, the relationship to the world is absent. Therefore, the representation of the ego cogito is abstract, whereas the ‘I-am-in-the-world’ lets the ‘I’ be conjoined with the world, that is, as something primordially concrete [ur-konkret]” (Z 175). And as Merleau-Ponty says in 1945 (in a way that now, e.g. recalling our exegesis of the white-patch-on-background passage, should not be cryptic at all): Universality and the world are at the core of individuality and of the subject. We will never understand this as long as we turn the world into an ob-ject; but we will understand it immediately if the world is the field of our experience, and if we are nothing but a perspective upon the world, for then the most secret vibration of our psycho-physical being already anticipates the world, quality is the sketch of a thing, and the thing is the initial sketch of the world 1. (PP 428)
But, second, both the subject and the world are given ambivalently. It is not just perception that can get confused, or unclear and indistinct, but the world itself. Neither is opaque “in themselves”, but neither is it 1
—and we are each qua such a being a movement always-already tracing out such sketches”, we might add.
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the case that perception is “in itself ” certain (as Descartes would have it, grounded in the absolute certainty of the Cogito) nor that the world exists (as it is or at all) with necessity, i.e. in the sense of causal necessity (the same going for its phenomena). Rather, both subject and world are interlocked by sense or meaningful transcendence, and “I can get it wrong” when it comes to the sense of something, as illustrated by Merleau-Ponty’s example above of the flat stone that turns out to be a patch of sunlight. The “originary subjectivity” of the “primordial I” (the subject of sense, the “I” of the new cogito) only has a “confused hold” upon both “itself and upon the world” (PP 427). This is why the new cogito grounds reliability rather than certainty—a connection Heidegger also draws later (in 1966): “Having a hold [Rat] is something I can rely on” (Z 209). This is manifested in perception, which is itself a more primordial “stratum” of subjectivity than thought, but it also manifested in thought (there is always an infinite horizonal remainder that escapes the totality of thought/knowledge/concept—whether we are talking about Levinas contra Hegel in the history of philosophy, the category of the Real in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, or Gödelian incompleteness and the crushed ambitions of Hilbertian formalism in mathematical logic). As Merleau-Ponty says: “To this initial outline of being that shines through in the concordances of my own experience and intersubjective experience, and whose possible completion I presume through indefinite horizons—from the simple fact that my phenomena solidify in a thing and follow a certain constant style in their unfolding—that is, to this open unity of the world, an open and indefinite unity of subjectivity must correspond” (PP 429). These new-cogito qualities of ambivalence, incompleteness, indefiniteness—both on the part of the perceptual subject and on the part of the phenomenological “world” in their “conjoinedness” or equiprimordiality—are not due to any kind of deficiency or lack. Rather, this is what existence is like because the “I” as being-in-the-world is a free movement of transcendence through the “thickness of the world” of sense (a “trans-sens-dence”, so to speak)—which are more the richness both of the subject and of the world than any deficiency of either. For just as it is always possible for me to be deceived by the world, it is always possible for me to be surprised by the world; and it is due to the same rich ambivalence of sense that makes error possible that I can be creative: what allows me to “mistake” (mis-take) the sense of something is also what allows me to discover and/or create new senses through metaphor—metaphors even frequently originate as serendipitous “mis-takes” of sense (that turn out to have a sense after all, one formerly unseen that once seen reveals new senses and horizons of sense in turn). Recall from above (PP 139): “the movement of existence, which does not suppress the radical diversity of contents, for it does not unite them by placing them all under the domination of an ‘I think’, but rather by orienting them toward the inter-sensory unity of a ‘world’.” IV So how does the new cogito “for” phenomenology, so different in aim as well as content from the Cartesian Cogito, answer the skeptical challenge of the so-called evil genius? As the question opening this final section, this also means: What is the sense of this “for” that links the new cogito with phenomenological and existential philosophy—and how does it compare with the sense in which the Cogito was intended (as absolute ground of certainty, etc.) “for” philosophy by the rationalist Descartes? First let us recall how the Cartesian Cogito conjured and calmed this theoretical threat. And let us do this via a detour through Derrida.
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In his deservedly famous essay “Cogito and the History of Madness”, Derrida articulates an important insight about the Cartesian Cogito. He comes to this insight rather circuitously, by way of a deconstruction of the entire project of Foucault’s 673-page History of Madness, which deconstruction he executes via a critique of an interpretation that Foucault gives in “three pages—and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter” (WD 32) of an early passage in the first of the Meditations. In essence, Foucault wants to write a history of madness itself, that is madness speaking on the basis of its own experience and under its own authority, and not a history of madness described from within the language of reason, the language of psychiatry on madness [,i.e.,] on madness already crushed beneath psychiatry, dominated, beaten to the ground, interned, that is to say, madness made into an object and exiled as the other of a language and a historical meaning which have been confused with logos itself. (WD 34)
One could say that Foucault wants to “think the unthought” in all previous historical treatments of the subject, so to speak. The upshot is supposed to be that madness as a form of unreason and the form(s) of reason are on a par (just one is de facto normal or “accepted”), and that this has not been obvious before because reason has historically “interned” and “excluded” madness as a radical “other” (in concrete ways), something like the way lepers had previously been contained and excluded from the community— and that this conception or rather repression of madness is historically emergent (not an eternal truth or natural condition etc.). And finally: the time at which this “summary expulsion of the possibility of madness from thought itself ”, or its “internment” by “reason”, is supposed to be precisely that of Descartes, who is even “alleged to have executed the act of force” himself in the opening of the First Meditation (WD 45). The key here—for Foucault—is the way that madness is treated differently from sensory error or perceptual illusion by Descartes. For instance, he writes: “‘In the economy of doubt, there is an imbalance between madness, on the one hand, and dream and error, on the other. Their situation in relation to the truth and to him who seeks it is different: dreams or illusions are surmounted within the structure of truth; but madness is inadmissible for the doubting subject’” (WD 47). Now, Derrida painstakingly refutes Foucault’s reading through a detailed exegesis of the Cartesian texts in question, but for present purposes the relevant exegesis can be fairly briefly summarized. The doubt-reduction is actually deployed twice, much as Husserl’s phenomenological reduction is applied twice2, and in both cases the second reduction is the “true”3 one. The first, or “natural” reduction, is feigned or is a feint, depending as always upon the perspective involved in the reception of these words (it is “feigned” in the propaedeutic and/or maieutic sense of a “feigned objection” (WD 50), one which would precede in order to prepare the way for reception of “the true” or non-feigned “objection”, or here, reduction; it is a “feint” in the sense that it is a move within the intellectual interlocution that is inscribed in the text(s)4 in question as its very form—a feint in the sense of a strategic “Socratic” or “dialectical” deception meant, again, to motivate the reader to receive the true or non-deceptive message). The second reduction is the one that counts—that leaves standing only the absolute consciousness of the transcendental ego, for Husserl, and the ego of the cogito, for Descartes. In Descartes’s text, the second 2
In e.g. _____ (Ideas I?)
3
This claim at the very least holds in the following sense: it is the second reduction that is the “true” phenomenological reduction (according to Husserl), and likewise for the Cartesian reduction (according to Descartes, though perhaps more implicitly). 4
I mean the Cartesian Meditations, though perhaps the same could be said for certain texts of Husserl.
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doubt-reduction is motivated by the fact that some things are left standing by the first doubt-reduction: doubting-reducing all truths of perception still (supposedly) left standing still-seemingly indubitable truths, like the perennially-called “eternal truths of mathematics” (after all—goes the feint—“whether I am awake or asleep, two and three added together are five” (MFP 14)). And then there are basic categories, like “extension” (MFP 14), the existence of which were to motivate a later “transcendental turn” (in fact, many such later “transcendental turns”, but I of course meant Kant)—and Descartes’s doubtingreduction is really no more distant from the “transcendental turn” than it is from the “phenomenological reduction”. And the second doubt-reduction is, famously, the introduction of the so-called “malicious demon” (MFP 15) or “evil genius” (WD 52). The Meditations were of course originally written in Latin, and the source terms here are malignum and genium. While the Latin genius (of which genium is of course an inflected form) carries divine connotations5 no longer present in its English cognate, the context in which Descartes introduces the term makes it explicit that this thought-construct is to essentially be understood as an evil version of God (“I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good, but rather some malicious demon…”)—essentially, God (with omnipotence, omniscience, etc.) malignum rather than bonum. And the point, of course, is that even (an evil) God could deceive Descartes—even with regard to the “truths” left standing by the first doubting-reduction. So, back to Foucault: in essence, according to Derrida, he misses the “pedagogical and rhetorical” nature of the first doubting-reduction, he mis-takes the sense of the feint. For the second doubting-reduction, the introduction of the evil genius, functions precisely to “evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness” (WD 52). That is, the first or “natural” doubting-reduction was inadequate, for it left standing truths which only a madman could deny—but then, Descartes is precisely seeking foundational and absolute certainty about all truths: this is an in-principle matter. Thus the second doubting-reduction, for which the first was merely a rhetorical prelude: “[t]hus, ideas of neither sensory nor intellectual origin will be sheltered from this new phase of doubt, and everything that was previously set aside as insanity is now welcomed into the most essential interiority of thought [or the ‘tribunal of reason’]” (WD 53). And now we come to Derrida’s insight, which in a sense is not “original” or even incisive at all, but in another is staggeringly so: [T]he Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. There is a value and a meaning of the Cogito, as of existence, which escape the alternative of a determined madness or a determined reason. […] The certainty [of the Cogito] need not be sheltered from an emprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself. It is valid even if I am mad (WD 55)
Which brings us to the point. Is Merleau-Ponty’s new cogito “valid” in a way that could guarantee not so much perceptual truths (because, well, all of the above—perception itself bears its reliability and verifiability/falsifiability within its actual structure)—which is just the first “feint” anyway—but “truths of reason” that could only be doubted by a madman… such as, in phenomenological terms, would have to somehow involve the very intersubjective motivational fabric of the world itself as whole? Or does the evil genius—or simply the specter of madness as such, i.e. total madness (a “mad world” to fit a mad subject) —still threaten despite the new, phenomenological, existential cogito; that is, does it threaten to undermine our faith in the world of/as sense, even once “world” is interpreted phenomenologically?
5
Cf. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=genium&la=la#Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=geniuscontents
Rice University, Fall 2015
Allen Porter | !10
Here, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological cogito, “I exist”, becomes explicitly not just an existential but an “existentialist” cogito, so to speak. It does not assure the certainty of perceptual truth, not even clear and distinct and motivationally explored; but this is not what is called for (indeed, this is recognized as madness that would mean the obliteration of all sense—and, after all, what could be madder than a ground of certainty that is valid even if I am totally mad?). Phenomenology is a descriptive rather than explanatory “science”—and “for” this project the new cogito provides a “(more) secure ground”, but “ground” in the sense of the “ground” of a pro-ject(ive inquiry), i.e. in the sense of an orienting point of departure or direction (versus, e.g., in the sense of a deductive basis for logical proofs). But what it does describe, when thematically or consciously-explicitly confronted with metaphysical doubts like the skeptical evil genius, demands or calls for a decision or resolution or the taking-up of an attitude on the part of the thinker as existing, even as perceptual existence. Which, as thrown and always-already interpreted being-in-the-world, we have always already done unconsciously or rather pre-thematically. Thus even the experience of a perceptual truth becomes an existential commitment, a kind of “primordial faith” (PP 431) in the equiprimordial givenness of subject and world, or in their sense as such: In the experience of a perceptual truth, I presume that the concordance experienced up until now would be maintained for a more detailed observation; I put my confidence in the world. To perceive is suddenly to commit to an entire future of experiences in a present that never, strictly speaking, guarantees that future; to perceive is to believe in a world. It is this opening up a world that makes perceptual truth possible, or the actual realization of a Wahr-Nehmung, and permits us ‘to cross out’ the preceding illusion, to hold it to be null and void. […] My belonging to the world allows me to compensate for the fluctuations of the cogito, to displace one cogito in favor of another, and to meet up with the truth of my thought beyond its appearance. In the very moment of illusion, this correction was presented to me as possible because the illusion itself makes use of the same belief in the world, only contracts into a solid appearance thanks to this contribution, and hence, being always open to an horizon of presumptive verifications, the illusion does not separate me from truth. But, for the same reason, I am not protected from error since the world that I aim at through each appearance, and that rightly or wrongly gives it the weight of truth, never necessarily requires this particular appearance. There is an absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any particular thing. Consciousness is distant from being and from its own being, and at the same time united to them, through the thickness of the world. The true cogito is not the private exchange between thought with the thought that I am having this thought, for they only unite through the world. The consciousness of the world is not established upon self-consciousness, but they are strictly contemporaries: there is a world for me because I am not unaware of myself; I am not concealed from myself because I have a world. This preconscious possession of the world in the pre-reflective cogito remains to be analyzed. (PP 310–11)
This is not as reassuring, perhaps, as Descartes’s version and use of the cogito would be, were his aspirations for it as expressed in that use tenable rather than, in fact, mad. But perhaps phenomenological existentialism is not meant to be reassuring. What we discover at “bedrock” is much closer to “blind faith” than to “absolute certainty”. That is precisely the point. The “primordial faith” in the world is the faith of the “primordial I”, which as pre-reflective is indeed “blind” in the relevant sense (though precisely not literally, i.e. visually): There is, then, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am there, and who marks out my place in that world. This captive or natural mind is my body, not the momentary body that is the instrument of my personal choices and that focuses upon some world, but rather the system of anonymous ‘functions’ that wraps each particular focusing into a general project. And this blind adhesion to the world, this prejudice in favor of being does not merely occur at the beginning of my life. It gives every subsequent perception its sense, and it is started over at each moment. (PP 265)
Rice University, Fall 2015
Allen Porter | !11
However, recognizing this factical “faith” as such, as faith (existentialist faith, in a sense not unfaithful to Kierkegaard)—awakening to this primordial facticity of one’s embodied being-in-the-world as a thrownness into the awe- or wonder-inspiring richness that is simultaneously the terrifying uncertainty of sense: being-in-the-thickness-of-the-world—is only attained through “fear and trembling”; and once one awakens to this sense of existence, the “preconscious possession of the world in the pre-reflective cogito” is not only a new orientation for philosophy, it is a call to every thinker to consciously “take up” and/or “appropriate” [Ereignis] this blind faith in an uncertain existence or existence as uncertainty, and thus a call to “take up” responsibility for this, in each case my very own, existence.
Bibliography (WD) Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (MFP) Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (BT) Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, John & Robinson, Edward. New York: Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1962. (Z) Heidegger, Martin. Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters. Trans. Mayr, Franz & Askay, Richard. Ed. Medard Boss. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001. (PP) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald Landes. New York: Rutledge, 2012.
