Dialectic of Institution: Merleau-Ponty's Overcoming of the Antinomy of Freedom and Necessity
Open Access
- Author:
- Gault, Samuel Ormiston
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 25, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Leonard Lawlor, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Leonard Lawlor, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Committee Member
Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Committee Member
Claire Mary Colebrook, Outside Member
Theodore Albert Toadvine Jr., Committee Member - Keywords:
- Merleau-Ponty
Phenomenology
Descartes
Ethics
Early Modern Philosophy
Freedom - Abstract:
- Dialectic of Institution: Merleau-Ponty’s Overcoming of the Antinomy and Freedom and Necessity advances an original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of "la chair" ("the flesh”), not merely as an effort to reconceive of “being” and “truth” beyond the modern dichotomy of “subjective freedom” and “objective necessity,” but also, and inseparably, as the articulation of an ethics of the flesh in the form of a general account of “virtue.” The fates of ethical meaning and scientific truth are, today, indissolubly bound up precisely by their separation, which renders them abstract. Insofar as the human significance of things and events is conceived of as purely subjective, no formulation of ethics can escape the charge of arbitrariness by appeal to some common evidentiary ground. Conversely, insofar as the truths of science and mathematics are conceived of as purely objective, it is as if they segregate off, from a world of “opinion” or “appearances,” their own proper world of “facts” to which human significance can only arbitrarily (i.e., unverifiably) be attributed. I argue, following Merleau-Ponty, that lived meanings and scientific truths are moments of a single, open dialectical movement of human existence, where each field of sense (e.g., emotion, music, painting, mathematics) becomes instituted (i.e., initially established, and continually sustained) by articulating a possible manner – latent on the horizons of previously established fields – in which living bodies can respond to, and question, other beings. In the first chapter, I undertake a genealogy, beginning with the thought of Descartes, of the three fundamental modern antinomies of “mind-body,” “self-others,” and “freedom-necessity,” before explicating Merleau-Ponty’s initial attempt to overcome them in PhP. Each antinomy comes to expression in an oscillation between the poles of “objective thought” (the modern identification of “reality” with “truth,” in the sense of what can be measured): epistemologically, “intellectualism” and “empiricism”; metaphysically, “idealism” and “realism.” Merleau-Ponty does not aim to “refute” these attitudes, but to show their incompleteness, the manner in which each takes the other’s explicit presupposition (i.e., respectively, “absolute subjectivity” and “pure objects”) as its own implicit foundation: a reciprocal “figure-ground” or “founding-founded” relation, which Merleau-Ponty describes by taking up the language of the Gestalt psychologists, and Husserl’s concept of "Fundierung" (“foundation” or “founding”). The dichotomies of objective thought are not “errors,” but highly formalized expressions of the Gestalt structure of the general movement of existence—the same structure articulated in behavior and perception. In place of the modern conceptions of “freedom” as absolutely unconditioned activity, and “necessity” as passive mechanism, he articulates “free choice” as an essentially conditioned response to the problems and the possibilities expressed by a given situation, and “necessity” as the value retroactively bestowed upon a situation by projects which take it up as their foundation. In the second chapter, I present my account of the new ontology Merleau-Ponty develops – particularly from the IP lectures on – to escape the language of “consciousness” and “objects” (which yet constrains his thought in PhP) by explaining the genesis of meaning and the individuation of living bodies and things as dimensions of a single movement of being. I take two lines of approach to this ontology: the first, exegetical; the second, phenomenological. First, exegetically, I articulate the passage of Merleau-Ponty’s thought by tracing his gradual transformation of the Husserlian concept of "Stiftung" (“institution” or “instituting”), from merely a tool for analyzing the acquisition and reactivation of habitualities of conscious life, to, in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, an articulation of the ontological functioning of beings whereby they become co-individuated in what is, simultaneously, the primordial birth of sense. In other words, Merleau-Ponty transforms “institution,” a concept of genetic phenomenology, into a means of explaining the common foundation of “things” and “meanings.” Next, I shift my own investigation to a phenomenological approach: specifically, to an internal critique of contemporary interpretations of a recent case of “acquired pedophilia” in conjunction with brain lesioning, which affords a concrete approach to Merleau-Ponty’s overcoming of the modern antinomies. Applying the concept of Stiftung to concrete phenomena of “choice,” I conclude that the freedom of life realizes itself in the advent of necessity, and, correlatively necessity arises as the expression of freedom. In the third chapter, I argue that the ontology of the flesh is simultaneously the outline for a new approach to ethical discourse and action, which makes apparent the truths expressed in both “objectivistic” and “relativistic” thought, as well as the mythical character of any absolute notions of necessity or contingency. Firstly, I explicate Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “authenticity,” arguing that it evokes openness to the ambiguity of the sense of beings: ambiguous because a being’s sense is its function within an always total, and always provisional, network of actual and possible relations. Secondly, I argue that this conception of ambiguity entails both negative and positive meta-ethical consequences: on the one hand, the recognition that a spoken values or principle becomes a dangerous “myth” insofar as it is taken to have a fixed and unconditionally universal sense; on the other, virtue in general must consist in a continual openness to situational demands to reflect upon the sense of one’s words and deeds, as well as to (hyper-)reflect upon the sense and genesis of one’s styles of reflection themselves. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s own suggestion in Signs, I articulate this conception of virtue via an extension and transformation of Machiavelli’s notion of political “prudence,” in terms of foresight, an openness to others which is neither domination nor subordination, and self-mastery (i.e., freedom relative to one’s past and one’s present values). Finally, I argue that the virtue of hyper-reflective openness to ambiguity possesses not just a meta-ethical, but also a normative function. While various normative principles and systems (e.g., deontology, utilitarianism, etc.) may prove well-suited to one’s efforts in given situations, the practice of Merleau-Pontian virtue alone can prevent them from regressing into delusional mythologies.