In line with the effort of Morton and others associated with speculative realism to move philosophy beyond its long human-centeredness, it's important to recognize that this impulse began in the later philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.
". . . The phrase “ontological lateness” is intended to underline the manner in which, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy limps behind the objects of its inquiry. 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. . . .
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.” 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. As ontologically late, then, we find ourselves in the midst of a world of meanings the origin of whichwe 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 thetext, “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 in
finite 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."
In Phenomenology of Perception, the articulation of the poles of ontological lateness first emerges in the Forward with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of transcendental idealism, or what he will interchangeably describe as “analytical reflection,” its correlate representationalist epistemology and the problem of solipsism that intractably emerges from such philosophies. In order to further clarify what I mean by “ontological lateness,” it will be useful to briefly consider some of these pages. In his discussion of transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty is more concerned with contemporary neo-Cartesians and neo-Kantians than with providing a close reading of Kant or Descartes themselves. For such philosophies, knowledge is conditioned by a Cogito that, as the source and origin of the world’s significance, has “priority over its own operations” and is characterized by a “complete intellectual possession” of the world (Ibid., xi). In other words, for there to be relations among things, for the meaning of the world to stand out in its articulation, there must be a corresponding act of relating, of sense-bestowal. What idealist philosophies mistakenly presuppose is that the movement of that which relates to that which is related is unidirectional, i.e., that the movement of sense bestowal goes only from consciousness toward the world and not the reverse. The result of this presupposition is that, in order to trace out this movement and make it explicit, idealist philosophies return to the subject of experience as its condition of possibility and its antecedent and assume that this subject can be distinguished from experience (Ibid., x). In other words, these philosophies mistakenly construe the return to consciousness as the source of the world as a return to a being which is prior to and independent of that world and in explaining the origin and ordering of experience, cease to take the evidence of experience into account.
The problem with “analytical reflection,” then, is that it privileges the aseity of the subject as the source and origin of all Sinngebung at the expense of the “aseity of things” (PhP, xvii). Merleau-Ponty begins this text with the question “Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie?” precisely in order to distinguish it from philosophies of analytical reflection and transcendental idealism. Through their commitment to the aseity of the subject, idealist philosophies close themselves up in an “impregnable subjectivity” that “untouched by being and time…[,] loses sight of its own beginning” (PhP, xi). Philosophies that account for the sense of the world through an appeal to the presence of a pure spectator are thus inevitably faced with the problem of solipsism.
For such philosophies, others are merely part of the representation formed by judgments and their constitutive origin is referred back to the spontaneity of consciousness and does not, therefore, indicate a transcendent that is indeed beyond the ordering activity of consciousness. If the world is reduced to the immanence of an all-encompassing synthesis, then others are simply determinations of thought or accomplishments of Sinngebung rather than, as Merleau-Ponty will put it, indicating another “myself” to whom we are addressed. For such philosophies, others “have validity rather than existence” and “there is nothing hidden behind these faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow which owes its very existence to the light” (PhP, xiii). Others are exhausted by synthesis, and since there is nothing beyond its reach, beyond the reach of constitution, there is nothing that is not in its grip since it is the source and origin of the world’s significance. This kind of philosophy, according to Merleau-Ponty, cannot account for others in their alterity because it rids “the world of its opacity and transcendence” (Ibid.). In order to overcome the problem of solipsism, philosophy must be able to account for the manner in which others are not merely part of my representation of the world but escape the grasp of constituting consciousness, i.e., that my encounter with the other is an encounter with one for whom I cannot fully account. To recognize so-called consciousness as ontologically late is to acknowledge that I’ve already found myself immersed in a situation that is not solely of my making, to recognize the “internal weakness” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks that “exposes me to the gaze of others” (Ibid. xiv) and that the syntheses that open the world and make meanings available to me precisely lack the timeliness that would make them all-encompassing and exhaustive.
The result of a philosophy of ontological lateness, then, is an account of the manner in which the world retains its opacity and transcendence by receding from my grasp.To recognize the presence of others and their constitutive opacity is to recognize the aseity of others and things, that there are indeed others there who have, in a sense, preceded me and who cannot be reduced to my constituting activity. I find myself in a situation of which I am not the sole author, and this indicates the first pole of ontological lateness: the impossibility of an absolute perspective, what Merleau-Ponty will describe as the “autochthonous significance of the world” (Ibid., 512). Finding myself among others, I find that I am not the sole origin of the world’s significance and that my constituting activity is circumscribed by my immersion in meanings that have preceded me. The first pole of ontological lateness, then, corresponds with the theme of passivity, or more precisely, as Merleau-Ponty will say in a famous working note of The Visible and the Invisible, the “passivity of activity” and the manifold ways in which all interpretative acts are inscribed within a situation, the origin of which constituting consciousness cannot attribute to itself. To recognize the opacity that others offer us, we must also acknowledge that the world I navigate confronts me with aspects which are characteristically ungraspable—for, in fact, the very presence of others indicates that there are facets over which thinking consciousness can have no hold. This is the second pole of ontological lateness: the centrifugal transcendence of the world. As the first pole corresponds with the theme of passivity, the second pole can be said to correspond with activity insofar as, for Merleau-Ponty, all constituting activity of Sinngebung is structurally unfinalizable and incomplete, for example, when he says that consciousness is “meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed” (Ibid. xx). The meanings that intentional activity brings into articulation escape the grip of rationality and the meanings it navigates. Precisely insofar as it is available as a complex of meaning-accomplishments, the world conceals dimensions and depths which recede beyond us. . . ."
KEITH WHITMOYER
ONTOLOGICAL LATENESS :MERLEAU-PONTY’S META-PHILOSOPHY
I post this extract and link because Whitmoyer's concept of 'ontological lateness' in interpreting MP's philosophy makes clear how phenomenological philosophy in MP's ontological development of it opened the way for OOO and Speculative Realism as well as Constructivism, which is acknowledged by many practitioners of these new directions of thought.
There must be other translations available in the Heidegger scholarship in English. I'll look around the house and see if I can locate Kaelin's Being and Time: A Reading for Readers. If this question had come up a half-dozen years ago I could have just called him up and asked him.