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Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sensible ideas’ and embodied-embedded practice

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Abstract

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty develops a notion of ‘sensible ideas’ that conceives general meaning as inseparable from its realization in sensible particulars. Such ideas – exemplified by music – are to capture the specificity of the meaning produced by embodied agency and serve as the foundation of all cognition. This article argues that, although Merleau-Ponty overgeneralizes their application, sensible ideas are philosophically important in enabling better understanding of the diverse forms and functions embodied-embedded practices and cognition can take. It begins by outlining Merleau-Ponty’s conception of sensible ideas and showing how this late ‘ontological’ view takes up and refines themes from his earlier works. It then assesses sensible ideas’ assumed foundational role by considering several embodied practices (mathematics, music, painting), arguing that this does not hold generally and that painting better exemplifies sensible ideas than music. I show that whether a practice is accurately described by sensible ideas depends on how it relates the particular and general, and that sensible ideas have a distinctive philosophical role in understanding the non-identity-based meaning constitution characteristic of some embodied-embedded practices. Finally, a comparison with Kant’s aesthetic ideas is used to clarify the close but non-necessary relation between sensible ideas and art.

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Notes

  1. Carbone’s (2001, 130–139 and 155–158; 2008; 2011, 125–162) extensive discussions are the main exception, offering detailed exegesis of Merleau-Ponty’s texts and their sources. See also Wiskus, 2008 and 2013, 90–101 on the specific importance of musical ideas. – The more general claim is discussed, for example, by Dillon, 1997, 214–223, Barbaras, 2001, 321–343, and Landes, 2013, 172–180.

  2. The passage Merleau-Ponty (cf. 1996, 191–3) has in mind is Proust, 1987, 343–345. It is also cited by Phenomenology of Perception, which had previously quoted two sentences, respectively preceding and following it (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 213, 170; see note 7 below).

  3. For discussion of the relation of Merleau-Ponty’s to Plato’s conception of ideas see Wiskus, 2008.

  4. Here I interpret Merleau-Ponty’s (nonstandardly) hyphenated ‘contre-sens’ as ‘Widersinn’ in Husserl’s usage.

  5. On the notion of adumbration see Ideas I, §41. For perceptual ‘horizons’ and Husserl’s generalization of these to all subjective experiences (‘jedes Erlebnis’) see Husserl, 1950, 62 [§9] and 82 f. [§19] respectively.

  6. It also underlies Sartre’s (1966) ‘transcendent ego’, which Merleau-Ponty (1990, 423–468) is critically developing.

  7. This contrasts with Phenomenology of Perception, where Proust’s discussion of musical ideas was interpreted as demonstrating the body’s privileged role ‘as mediator of a world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 169 f.).

  8. Recall Sartre’s (1943, 33) definition of being-in-itself: ‘Being is. Being is in itself. Being is what it is.’.

  9. Merleau-Ponty, 1997, 178 f. similarly distances itself from the notion of identity in explaining mathematical truths.

  10. Presumably due to its non-subject-centred approach, The Visible and the Invisible remains largely silent on the emotional-affective character of preconceptual meaning. However, although rarely expressed, Merleau-Ponty still conceives both truth and ‘representative sensation’ as closely linked with emotion (Merleau-Ponty, 1999, 28, 288). This link plausibly accounts for sensible ideas’ potential to transform agents that is nicely highlighted by Wiskus (2013, 94).

  11. I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s integration of Saussure’s views into his conception of language in Inkpin, 2016a, 120–128.

  12. Several working notes demonstrate The Visible and the Invisible’s ongoing commitment to Saussure’s approach. In particular the term écart (separation or divergence), which Merleau-Ponty thought central in reconceiving linguistic meaning, is explained in Saussurean terms (Merleau-Ponty, 1999, 252, 273).

  13. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 439–452; 1997, 166–181; 2015, 117–128.

  14. He diverges from Husserl in focusing on speech (parole) rather than writing as ‘the act though which [thought] eternalizes itself in truth’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 445; cf. 1999, 155, 199). In later commentary on Husserl, he distinguishes two feats: while speech realizes ideation, writing establishes ‘the possibility of permanence of the ideal’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1998, 28, cf. 25).

  15. Accordingly, he sees the apparently timeless structures of an eidos or essence as a retrospective construct (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 441; 1997, 173; 1999, 145 f.).

  16. Merleau-Ponty (1999, 198 and 200) signals that further, more detailed, discussion was to follow.

  17. To give two examples: His 1960–61 course notes do describe sensible ideas as ‘founding [fondant] their intellectual equivalents’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, 193, 195); similarly, the ‘ideal world’ is to ‘rest on [appuyé sur] the sensible world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1998, 69).

  18. With the transition to language, visibility is ‘affranchie’ albeit not ‘delivrée […] de toute condition’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1999, 198).

  19. More surprisingly, although probably due to incompleteness, The Visible and the Invisible doesn’t discuss how sensible horizons are modified once ideas of the intelligence are established. (Cf. his earlier emphasis on interaction between physiological and personal levels of embodiment when discussing phantom limbs or sexuality, Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 98–101, 184–187.).

  20. Husserl (1976, 185 f. [§83]) had described the ‘experiential horizon’ (Erlebnishorizont) as ‘an idea in the Kantian sense’, which he interprets to mean that ‘adequate determination of its content […] is unattainable’.

  21. For Kant, in §26 of the Critique of Judgement, this is the distinctive feat of reason that allows an infinite progression to be conceived adequately under an idea. In his words, the ‘voice of reason […] requires totality’ (Kant, 1983b, 340 f.; cf. Kant, 1983a, 402 [B436]).

  22. Merleau-Ponty’s significance as a precursor of such theories is widely recognized (see, for example, Varela et al., 1993; Gallagher, 2005; Thompson, 2007, 66–87). My distinctive proposal here is that sensible ideas are structures realized by, and hence characterizing, embodied-embedded practices.

  23. Phenomenology of Perception already characterizes ‘concrete essences’ and the ‘concrete subject’ as combining particularity with generality (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 147, 514), while Merleau-Ponty (1959, 91) views the ‘phenomenon of expression’ as the ‘junction of the individual and the universal’.

  24. This image of a ‘temporal wave’ was similarly employed in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 306, 318, 381).

  25. These implications are explored with great insight and subtlety by Carbone, 2011, 65–146.

  26. As Merleau-Ponty (1990, 440) appreciates.

  27. For Goodman (1976, 128–130) the score’s primary function is to identify a work from performance to performance. To do this (i) it must pick out performances of the work; (ii) given a performance and the notational system, it must be uniquely determined.

  28. That ‘Eye and Mind’ doesn’t discuss sensible ideas is noteworthy, but I think explained by that essay’s focus and Merleau-Ponty’s own preference for the example of music (and Proust). Nevertheless, it alludes to them in suggesting that painting explores a ‘dreamlike universe of carnal essences’ and – as Carbone (2001, 133, 155) recognizes – that the role of colour in painting should have led Descartes to the ‘problem of a universality and an opening onto things without concepts’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, 34, 43).

  29. Another reason painting better exemplifies sensible ideas is that paintings are more clearly linked with representational content than music.

  30. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1997, 180, which parallels his view of established patterns of language use (Merleau-Ponty, 1990, 229, 214; 1997, 20; similarly 1999, 198). This significance is similarly overlooked by Hass (2007, 146–170), whose reading of Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the role of creativity in mathematics.

  31. This claim might be disputed by someone like Kulvicki (2006), who defines pictures as a general structure (‘syntactic type’). I argue elsewhere (Inkpin, 2016b) that this approach is ill suited to freehand depictions such as paintings.

  32. One indication that this is close to Merleau-Ponty’s concerns is his rejection of ‘positive thinking’, corresponding to Sartre’s being-in-itself, along with Sartre’s (1943, 32) view that the ‘principle of identity […] refers to a singular region of being: that of being-in-itself’.

  33. Parallel arguments can be made for Merleau-Ponty’s conception of style, which similarly breaks with identity-based thinking (cf. Inkpin, 2019).

  34. To give two Aristotelian examples (Aristotle, 1933, 4–5 [981a12-24] and 1934, 344–351 [1141b14-1142a23]). More broadly, it would also include any activities covered by Gadamer’s (1990, 312–46) conception of hermeneutic experience, on which understanding of established norms is perfected by their in situ application (Anwendung, Applikation).

  35. Hence, for Carbone (2001, 134–5 and 163) sensible ideas are ‘aesthetic’ in the dual sense of being sensible and creative/artistic. – Merleau-Ponty adopts the expression ‘logos of the aesthetic world’ from Husserl (1974, 297) in likening his own project to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic.

  36. By the term ‘Darstellung’ (for the Latin ‘exhibitio’) Kant means finding an intuition (particular) that corresponds to a given general meaning, usually a concept (Kant, 1983b, 267). – Kant links aesthetic ideas with art, including painting, at Kant, 1983b, 416.

  37. I am assuming, as Matherne (2013) argues, that Kant’s aesthetic ideas are not limited to specific contents, but can in principle accommodate a wide range of subject matters.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sebastian Gardner for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for pressing me to respond to certain concerns that other readers would no doubt have shared.

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    Andrew Inkpin

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Inkpin, A. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘sensible ideas’ and embodied-embedded practice. Phenom Cogn Sci 22, 501–524 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09750-1

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