Zeichen

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Christian Bermes

"Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole."Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life. For him, expression is a category of human behavior and existence much broader than language alone. He maintains that man is essentially expressive, even prior to in his silence, gestures, and lived behavior.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, 20th Century, Linguistics, Essays, Politics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.

Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.

Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

101111: do not know if i should rate this so highly, but i like everything by m-p. this is a collection of pieces, some essays, some short views, some very good and some less good. there is 'the philosopher and his shadow' that makes up for some others. technical philosophical essays are good but others about communism or madagascar or algiers or other events of the time are now dated and hard to judge. interesting to read someone writing in those times just post ww2, writing about marxism while it was becoming rigid, totalitarian, buried in contingency, in politics, in war and recovery, in Russia. whether the russian revolution was irredeemable failure, what is the correct position when fighting reactionary movements etc. it is interesting to try and think of political attitudes without distorted practice or disabling cynicism...

[0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1960, shortly before his death, Signs collects 25 of Merleau-Ponty's essays and lectures drawn from various sources. We have some, but not all, of the pieces he wrote for Les Temps Moderne from 1947-1952 under the editorial pseudonym "T.M." (excluded are the entirety of the essays that comprised Humanism and Terror; "Apology for International Conferences," which appears in Texts and Dialogues; "Film and the New Psychology," which appears in Sense and Non-Sense; the introduction to Human Engineering by Michel Crozier and "The Adversary is Complicit," which appears in the Merleau-Ponty reader; and several essays which are as of yet untranslated into English--"In a Dubious Fight," "The Works of the Pleiade," "Objective Complicity," "Death of Emmanuel Mounier," and "Response to C.L.R. James"). Also included are:

-some essays from L'Express from 1954-1958 ("On Claudel," "On Eroticism," "On News Items," "The Yalta Papers," "Einstein and the Crisis of Reason," "On Abstaining," "The Future of the Revolution," "On De-Stalinization," "On May 13, 1958," "Tomorrow," and "On Madagascar"),
-A 1951 essay titled "The Philosopher and Sociology,"
-Some introductory essays from a 1956 anthology on the history of philosophy entitled Famous Philosophers, which he collaborated on with Gilles Deleuze, Alfred Schutz, Gilbert Ryle, and Jean Starobinski,
-And some conference lectures delivered in 1952 ("On the Phenomenology of Language") and 1959 ("The Philosopher and His Shadow," "From Mauss to Claude Levi-Strauss," and "Bergson in the Making").

Taken as a whole, the essays express Merleau-Ponty's later writings on Marxism after he had grown disillusioned with it, and his views on language, phenomenology and science from his "middle" period, in which he consciously attempted to blend phenomenology with linguistic, anthropological, and psychological structuralism (represented by the work of Ferdinand De Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Jacques Lacan, respectively), in order to study the genesis and development of meaningful sociohistorical structures and the positions of individual actors within them.

The essays are uneven. History has made nearly all of Merleau-Ponty's political writings and his penchant for liberal humanism seem conservative, outdated, and irrelevant for contemporary concerns. If by 1959 he could no longer believe in the Marxist revolution as it had developed in Europe, he finds cautious hope that the uprisings in China, Algieria, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos may turn out differently, and he places his hopes in the fulfillment of a messianic liberalism-to-come, in which the constitutional values of liberty, equality and fraternity will actually be realized in social practice through parliamentary republicanism. His critique of attempts to submit human sciences to an objective method has been so fully normalized that it now appears to laboriously state the obvious, and his retaining belief in the possibility of a universal knowledge of the essence of "man"--even the particular, situated, reflexive, incomplete, horizonal and "lateral" universal he proposes as a goal--appears as an antiquated fossil in light of the last 30 years of postmodernism (although by the present day, it could just as well offer a welcome reprieve from the perhaps excessive suspicion of "universality" postmodernity has mistakenly believed itself to have inculcated).

Still, there are some standout essays which, I think, save the book from being confined to the dustbin of history, by virtue of their poetry and their premonition of what was to come. "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" attempts to found the seemingly aribtrary relation between the linguistic signifier and signified upon the silent, proto-linguistic world of perceptual structures, and concludes that language speaks best when it reveals its own incompleteness and foundation in the lacunary, diacritical, proto-linguistic, and silent world of perception. "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in its attempt to draw out the "unthought" elements of Husserlian phenomenology in the "margins" of his texts, subversively reveals the transcendental activity of constituting consciousness to be grounded upon a series of initially unconscious and passive responses to a world which always transcends being made fully present. And the book's "Introduction" offers a wistful meditation on the nature of retrospective self-critique--using the early critical rumblings of what would later become known as "post-Marxism" and Sartre's 1960 preface to the reissue of Paul Nizan's 1931 memoir Aden Arabie as examples. Here, Sartre's eulogy for his dead friend, reminiscence on their naive youth together, and his chastisement of his younger self's inability to understand Nizan's suffering seem to stand in for Merleau-Ponty's own misgivings about his youthful, misplaced faith in the dream of revolutionary Marxism, which the course of time revealed to be a nightmare. The difficulty which spares Merleau-Ponty his own self-chastisement is the unbridgeable difference between the contingency of history as it is lived in the present moment and its appearance as a historical necessity in hindsight.

These three essays comprise some of the best of what Merleau-Ponty's thought has to offer: a thought which everywhere seeks its own foundations and discovers only its inability to do so--an inability which, far from being its failure, is thought's success, because the incompleteness of reflective consciousness is filled by the transcendent mystery of the world and of reason, which throws consciousness into wonder and astonishment. You can see here a premonition of what would later blossom into "deconstruction" without the nihilistic and the skeptical tendencies of the latter. For Merleau-Ponty, the revelation of mystery, incompletness, unconsciousness, and ambiguity is not merely a fall into obscurity, but is simultaneously and for the same reason an ascension to eternal truth--that philosophy is without a definitive beginning or an end, and that all it has to do to assure itself of its destination is to look. There is a kind of atheistic Christianity here, a godless panentheism in which the world takes the place of first cause, is identified as the creator which creates itself, and is expressed in the ambiguous life of our body as it intertwines activity and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, natura naturata and natura naturans, to achieve a "unity-in-difference" in which the two terms are not yet so distinct from each other as they will later be to reflective thought. As in Plotinus, the unity is at the beginning, and the splitting of the One (which was never fully One) into two (which is never fully two) which reflective thought accomplishes expresses a fall from grace for as long as thought fails to grasp its inherence in the divine source from whence it came and towards which its destiny is to return (which is never fully completed except in the movement back and forth between unreflective life and reflective thought itself). If heaven, or utopia, or happiness are never fully present, neither are they fully absent from our lives. We remain nestled within them as the ultimate horizon of the Earth within which we move. It's a beautiful thought, one which aims to find completeness within incompleteness, aims at coming to rest in movement, and aims at identity through the thickness and differentiation of the folding and unfolding of "the flesh of the world." But I'll save my thoughts on those topics for another review.

[natalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

acho que "a linguagem indireta e as vozes do silêncio" foi um dos textos mais lindos e delicados que já pude ler um dia sobre a pintura

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Che accadrà quando uno di essi si volgerà verso di me, sosterà il mio sguardo e rinchiuderà il suo sul mio corpo e sul mio volto? A meno che ricorriamo all'astuzia della parola, e interponiamo tra noi un dominio comune di pensieri, l'esperienza è intollerabile. Non c'è più da guardare se non uno sguardo, chi vede e chi è visto sono esattamente sostituibili, i due sguardi si immobilizzano vicendevolmente, nulla può distrarli e distinguerli l'uno dall'altro, poiché le cose sono abolite e ciascuno è in rapporto solo con il suo duplicato. [...] La visione realizza qualcosa che la riflessione non comprenderà mai: essa fa sì che a volte il combattimento sia senza vincitore, e il pensiero, da questo momento, senza titolare. (Prefazione p.35)

Nella bellissima prefazione a Segni Maurice Merleau-Ponty mette a nudo se stesso e si interroga incessantemente sulla sua visione ontologica e politica, preannunciando relativamente alla prima quelle riflessioni che svilupperà poi nell'incompiuto Il visibile e l'invisibile. Ciò nonostante, questa raccolta di saggi viene concepita dal filosofo come un ricominciamento di tutto il suo pensiero sviluppatosi lungo gli anni '50 a partire dalla linguistica di Saussure e dall'importanza che il linguaggio riveste nella vita di ogni uomo. Raccogliendo, quindi, tutta una serie di saggi e di interventi fatti lungo quegli anni, Merleau-Ponty struttura la raccolta in due differenti sezioni, la prima filosofica, la seconda politica.

A mio modo di vedere il vero punto di interesse sono proprio i saggi della prima parte, molto eterogenei ed estremamente interessanti, tra le monografie di Bergson, Machiavelli, Montaigne e i problemi della Fenomenologia e del linguaggio, con in mezzo una sempre più rilevante apertura allo Strutturalismo di Lévi-Strauss.

Ora, quando una striatura del pennello sostituisce la ricostituzione, in linea di principio completa, delle apparenze per introdurci alla lana o alla carne, a sostituire l'oggetto non è più il soggetto, ma la logica allusiva del mondo percepito. Si vuole sempre significare che c'è qualcosa da dire, cui ci si avvicina più o meno. Solamente, l'<> di Van Gogh quando dipinge i corvi non indica più una realtà verso cui procedere, ma quello che resta da fare per restituire l'incontro dello sguardo con le cose che lo sollecitano, di colui che deve essere con ciò che è. E questo rapporto non si può certo copiare. (Il linguaggio indiretto e le voci del silenzio, p.75)

Confrontandosi vivacemente con Marlaux, Merleau-Ponty individua nella pittura una forma di "linguaggio indiretto" privilegiata e che diverrà il filo conduttore del suo ultimo saggio, L'occhio e lo spirito: il pittore vede i fantasmi nascosti dal visibile e li riporta sulla tela in modo che essi si impregnino di un senso che può essere compreso solo a patto di rinunciare al nostro modo di riflettere e aprendosi all'interpretazione dell'altro. In fondo, scrive lo stesso Merleau-Ponty qualche pagina prima, Il senso del quadro resta prigioniero per noi che non comunichiamo con il mondo mediante la pittura , e, di conseguenza, ci invita ad aprirci alla dimensione estetica dell'arte senza presunzione o alterigia in modo da riuscire ad andare oltre i segni del pennello per scorgere un profondo grumo di significati: ed è proprio grazie a questo spirito che l'arte si è staccata dalla rigorosa prospettiva rinascimentale per individuare nuovi punti di vista originali per squarciare ciò che si nasconde dietro il visibile. Nello stesso saggio, Merleau-Ponty affronta anche il linguaggio della scrittura, il cui orizzonte di significati è meno speciale rispetto a quello pittorico, poiché le parole si basano su convenzioni, fanno parte di un "linguaggio da iniziati", ma nondimeno assolve la medesima funzione.

Due saggi sono dedicati ad Husserl. In particolar modo, ne Il filosofo e la sua ombra Merleau-Ponty si confronta col suo "maestro" per mettere in luce l'estrema importanza del suo pensiero non solo per la sua filosofia, ma addirittura per la tradizione occidentale: la riduzione fenomenologica, in tali termini, diventa un metodo di ricominciamento per tracciare un nuovo modo di porsi nei confronti dell'esistenza, ed è in essa che Merleau-Ponty stesso comprende l'importanza del corpo e del suo comportamento. Tutta la sua fenomenologia sarebbe impossibile da pensare senza i presupposti di Husserl, alcuni dei quali controversi poiché sottoposti a continui ripensamenti: in questi termini l'atto di Merleau-Ponty denota un'estrema onestà intellettuale che in un filosofo non si può che apprezzare e ammirare.

In uno dei saggi, breve ma estremamente intenso, Merleau-Ponty si confronta con Einstein e i contributi delle sue speculazioni sulla teoria della relatività: lo stesso Einstein era uno spirito classico, afferma il filosofo, poiché egli era tentato di raggiungere la verità con le sue teorie, mettendo in crisi, invece, quelle concezioni ottimistiche dei grandi pensatori del seicento/settecento, profondamente convinti di poter tracciare nello spazio e nel tempo delle forme a priori perfettamente delineate e sempre valide per tutti (si pensi a Leibniz e alla sua armonia prestabilita tra Monadi, o ancora al panteismo matematico di Spinoza, in cui tutto è determinato e preciso), indipendentemente dal punto di vista adottato. Il dibattito tra Merleau-Ponty e la scienza, dispiegato lungo il corso di tutta la sua produzione filosofica, è ancora estremamente attuale, e il suo interesse nei confronti del modo con cui la scienza lavora per raggiungere delle conclusioni pragmatiche merita tutta l'attenzione di coloro che lavorano in ambito scientifico: solo così può essere compresa la lapidaria sentenza La scienza manipola le cose e rinuncia ad abitarle in apertura a L'occhio e lo spirito.

L'ultimo degli undici saggi che costituiscono la prima parte (non che gli altri non siano interessanti, ovviamente, però mi limito a seminare qualche punta di interesse) è dedicato al concetto di avversità in relazione alle teorie di Freud e al nuovo rapporto soggetto-oggetto: Merleau-Ponty osserva, infatti, come questi fattori abbiano cambiato la concezione dell'uomo e dell'esperienza, basata sulla contingenza e non su verità determinate. Scrive, infatti:

Quando le nostre iniziative rimangono invischiate nel corpo, nel linguaggio o in questo mondo smisurato che ci è dato da finire, non è perché un genio maligno ci opponga le sue volontà: si tratta solo di una specie di inerzia, di una resistenza passiva, di un venir meno del senso: di una avversità anonima. Ma anche il bene è contingente. Non si dirige il corpo reprimendolo, né il linguaggio ponendosi nel pensiero, né la storia ricorrendo continuamente a giudizi di valore: si deve sempre sposare ognuna di queste situazioni, e quando esse si superano, lo fanno spontaneamente. (L'uomo e l'avversità, pp.271-272)

La seconda parte del libro è quella più delicata poiché meno fruibile e dilettevole delle altre: Merleau-Ponty raccoglie in essa tutta una serie di argomenti inerenti alla politica del suo tempo, e in esse dispiega la sua tormentata visione marxista e comunista. La differenza di posizione tra un argomento e l'altro si nota se si tiene conto degli anni in cui questi sono stati pubblicati e si scorge in essa quel distanziamento e quella presa di posizione più radicale testimoniata da Le avventure della dialettica. Restano comunque un punto di riferimento interessante per coloro che sono interessati all'evoluzione del pensiero politico di Merleau-Ponty, che di per sé non è semplicissimo da seguire né da tracciare.

Consiglio vivamente la lettura di questi saggi ma non come punto di partenza per approcciare Merleau-Ponty, dal momento che non sono ordinati cronologicamente ed è necessario conoscere alcune basi del suo pensiero per poterli comprendere pienamente. La prima parte, come già detto, è quella più affascinante per gli appassionati e gli studiosi della filosofia, mentre la seconda potrebbe competere, invece, agli storici o agli studiosi di filosofia politica, e non è decisamente nel mio campo di interesse primario.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

SOME ESSAYS BY THE FRENCH PHENOMENOLOGIST FROM HIS LAST DECADE

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher; he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53.

This 1960 book contains various writings of Merleau-Ponty---mostly on the philosophy of “expression”---that were composed during the last decade of his life.

He wrote in the Introduction, “Marx’s theses can remain true as the Pythagorean theorem is true: no longer in the same sense it was true for the one who invented it---as an immutable truth and a property of space itself---but as a property of a certain model of space among other possible spaces.” (Pg. 10) He continues, “The philosopher who maintains that the ‘historical process’ passes through his study is laughed at. He gets his revenge by settling the accounts of history’s absurdities. Such is his job in a vaudeville show which is now a century old. Yet if we look farther back into the past, if we ask ourselves what philosophy can be today, we shall see that the philosophy of God-like survey was only an episode---and that it is over. Now as before, philosophy begins with a ‘What is thinking?’ and is absorbed in the question to begin with.” (Pg. 14)

Later, he adds, “The philosophy which lays bare this chiasma of the visible is the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like survey. It plunges into the perceptible, into time and history, toward their articulations. It does not surpass them through forces it has in its own right; it surpasses them only in their meaning.” (Pg. 21)

He states, “There is no doubt that this marvel, whose strangeness the word ‘man’ should not hide from us, is a very great one. But we can at least recognize that this miracle is natural to us, that it begins with our incarnate life, and that there is no reason to look for its explanation in some Spirit of the World which allegedly operates within us without our knowledge and perceives in our place, beyond the perceived world, on a microscopic scale… We must therefore recognize that what is designated by the terms ‘glance,’ ‘hand,’ and in general ‘body’ is a system of systems devoted to the inspection of a world and capable of leaping over distances, piercing the perceptual future, and outlining hollows and reliefs, distances and deviations---a meaning---in the inconceivable flatness of being.” (Pg. 66-67)

He observes, “For more clearly (but not differently) in my experience of others than in my experience of speech or the perceived world, I invariably grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it. Positing another person as an other myself is not as a matter of fact possible if it is consciousness which must do it. To be conscious is to constitute, so that I cannot be conscious of another person, since that would involve constituting him as constituting, and as constituting in respect to the very act through which I constitute him.” (Pg. 93-94)

He suggests, “philosophy is not defined by a peculiar domain of its own. Like sociology, it only speaks about the world, man, and mind. It is distinguished by a certain MODE of consciousness we have of others, of nature, or of ourselves. It is nature and man in the present, not ‘flattened out’… in a derivative objectivity but such as they are presented in our present cognitive and active commerce with them. Philosophy is nature in us, the others in us, and we in them. Accordingly, we must not simply say that philosophy is compatible with sociology, but that it is necessary to it as a constant reminder of its tasks; and that each time the sociologist returns to the living sources of his knowledge, to what operates within him as a means of understanding the forms of culture most remote from him, he practices philosophy spontaneously. Philosophy is not a particular body of knowledge: it is the vigilance which does not let us forget the source of all knowledge.” (Pg. 110)

He states, “Then what is this feeling of self which is not in possession of itself and does not yet coincide with itself? It has been said that to take consciousness away from subjectivity was to withdraw being from it, that an unconscious love is nothing, because to love is to see someone---actions, gestures, a face, a body---as lovable. But the ‘cogito’ prior to reflection and the feeling of self without understanding present the same difficulty. Thus consciousness is either unaware of its origins or, if it wants to reach them, it can only project itself into them. In neither case should we speak of ‘discovery.’” (Pg. 153)

In an essay on Claudel, he stated, “If the genius is the man whose words have more meaning than he was able to impart to them himself---the man who is describing the contours of his private universe awakens in the man who differ from him most a sort of rememoration of what he is in the spectacle before us which is the world of other men as well---Claudel was at times a genius.” (Pg. 314)

This book will be of interest to those studying Merleau-Ponty.

[Martín Córdova · Rating 5 out of 5]

El pensamiento político devino merleaupontiano y poco crédito se le da.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s no main theme of the book that comes together. That said this still makes for a good compilation of thinkers. The politics at the end, being current to its own time is the only distracting thing in the book. Even that is interesting as a snap shot of the end of communism. This kind of array of creativity and perspective is hard to find without help from a publishing compilation.

[HrCristobal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danish translation: Tegn / om sprogets fænomenologi

[David Markwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice collection of essays from Merleau-Ponty's middle to late period.