KEITH WHITMOYER
ONTOLOGICAL LATENESS: MERLEAU-PONTY’S META-PHILOSOPHY
" . . . I propose to begin laying the ground work for a reading of
Phenomenology of Perception that approaches it, not from the perspective of its perhaps philosophically nascent state, but in terms of the compelling philosophical thesis that it nonetheless offers. In spite of what appears to be the diversity of readings to which this work lends itself, which take its thesis to concern the relationship between consciousness and nature, the articulation of a philosophy of perception, the articulation of a philosophy of embodiment, or the subversion of a Cartesian ontology,3 this text has an important unity and coherence. Rather than containing a series of interesting, though perhaps disjointed studies in perception and embodiment, I propose that, while these are certainly salient themes of the text, its thesis is rather the articulation of what I designate as a philosophy of “ontological lateness.”4 The phrase “ontological lateness” is intended to underline the manner in which, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy limps behind the objects of its inquiry.5 In other words, that at which philosophical inquiry aims, a conceptual grasp of the world, remains perpetually on its horizon, something to be sought rather than something to be obtained. The articulation of a philosophy of ontological lateness, therefore, is Merleau-Ponty’s attempt, in contrast to what he views to be the traditional understanding of philosophy, to begin to take the ambiguities, obscurities, fragilities, and incompleteness of human experience seriously.
While such a claim cannot be fully worked out in the space of an essay, I will try to begin illustrating the salience of “ontological lateness” for
Phenomenology of Perception by offering a “bookending” interpretation that shows it to be at play both in the Forward and in the final chapter on freedom. The first section of the essay will elaborate the theme of ontological lateness by addressing Merleau-Ponty’s remarks in the Forward on the problem of solipsism and his emergent critique of transcendental idealism. The philosophy of ontological lateness, we shall see, emerges from this critique as an attempt to take the obscurity that others must necessarily manifest seriously. The second section turns to Merleau-Ponty’s famous thesis that the phenomenological reduction cannot be completed. This thesis, I claim, operates in accordance with the poles of ontological lateness identified in the first section and brings them into further articulation. The third section turns to the final chapter on freedom to show that the theme of ontological lateness is relevant for understanding the closing gamut of the text. Human freedom, accordingly, is circumscribed by the very poles of ontological lateness that were identified in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the problem of solipsism and the phenomenological reduction. Finally, the theme of ontological lateness has meta-philosophical consequences that emerge from the dispossession of human experience that it signals. The final section of the paper returns to the Forward in order to elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the nature and purpose of the philosophical enterprise, his answer to the question with which the work begins,
“Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?”. This answer, I conclude, offers us an important clue for understanding a central notion of
The Visible and the Invisible, namely that of the “chiasm,” and suggests an important point of continuity between this work and the later works.
Part I: Ontological Lateness
What I call “ontological lateness” is characterized by two poles: First, we are ontologically late with respect to the situation in which we find ourselves and of which we are not the privileged authors; in other words, as Merleau-Ponty says, “My life has a significance I do not constitute.”6 Second and correlatively, having arrived in the world, we find that its sense and significance escape our attempts to put it in our grasp or, in other words, that the world is characterized by a certain inexhaustible transcendence.7 As ontologically late, then, we find ourselves in the midst of a world of meanings the origin of which we cannot trace to a transcendental perspective, and, simultaneously, we find that an exhaustive grip on those meanings is constitutively beyond our reach. Our openness to the world, therefore, is circumscribed by a certain inability insofar as this openness is always attenuated by our immersion in the world and the fact that the world, in concert with our immersion, is always beyond us. As Merleau-Ponty says in the Forward to
Phenomenology of Perception, “I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible” (PhP, xix) and again at the end of the text, “The world is already constituted, but never completely constituted; in the
first place we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities” (Ibid., 527). Ontological lateness, then, names Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to articulate a philosophy that gives voice to the manner in which we are confronted with meanings which always remain on the horizon of rationality, that beckon thought and yet escape its grasp.8 . . . ."
Ontological Lateness: Merleau-Ponty's Meta-Philosophy
