ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty’s first truly metaphilosophical reflections, which aim to put the philosophical enterprise back at the heart of human experience, are to be
found in his foreword to the Phenomenology of Perception, the manifesto of French phenomenology. The philosopher aims neither to give an explanation of the world, nor to discover its conditions of possibility, but simply to express that contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world. To do this, he must not interrupt the relationship which he, like all men, has with the world in ordinary life, but must simply suspend it, and take that distance from the world which the ancients termed ‘wonder’ and which is the true meaning of the famous phenomenological reduction. Husserl never ceased analysing this reduction, precisely because it must remain inherently incomplete, and because it cannot but lead to a recognition of that dependence of thought on unthought life which is, as Merleau-Ponty emphasises, ‘its initial, constant, and final situation’ (PhP, xiv/xvi – translation modified). The phenomenological epoche´, far from invalidating our belief in the world, is in fact the authentic discovery of the world, since only the epoche´ can render accessible the natural attitude at the very moment when it suspends it, as is made clear by Eugene Fink (Fink 1933; 1974, 135), who was as we know a fundamental guide for Merleau-Ponty in his reading of Husserl.4 For Merleau-Ponty this means that there is an insurmountable circularity between thought and life, in which experience always anticipates philosophy, and philosophy itself is only experience elucidated (PhP, 63/73). Reflection, the movement by which thought returns to itself, must recognise, in the unthought depths from which it comes, an ‘original past, a past which has never been present’ (PhP, 242/282), with which there is no possible correspondence. It is not surprising to see that the Phenomenology of Perception ends with the following words:
Whether it is a question of things of or historical situations, philosophy has no other function than to teach us to see them truly once again, and it is true to say that this comes about when philosophy destroys itself as a separate subject.
