Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenological Notion of Time.
Merleau-Ponty begins the Phenomenology of Perception by explaining that phenomenology aims to uncover our primitive contact with the world and the study of essences, and so may give us an account of space as it is lived. While appreciative of scientific explorations of the world and space, Merleau-Ponty asserts that all knowledge garnered from scientific inquiry is originally “gained through [one’s] own particular viewpoint” and built upon our primordial being-in-the-world, since science is a secondary tool that we learned from others.
Merleau-Ponty criticized intellectual and empirical approaches. Choosing phenomenological path, the philosopher looks upon the body-subject as the absolute source and [one’s] perspective in understanding the world. Hence, intellectualists and empiricists approaches are guilty of reading results of perception (the objective world) back into perceptual experience, in such a fashion mistaking the characteristic structure of perception: the spontaneous organization or configuration of perceived phenomena themselves, with their indeterminacies and ambiguities, and the dynamic character of perception, as a historical process involving development and transformation. By treating perception as a causal process of transmission or a cognitive judgment, empiricism and intellectualism deny any meaningful configuration to the perceived as they treat all values and meanings as projections, leaving no basis in perception itself for distinguishing the true from the illusory. Merleau-Ponty believes phenomenological investigations will show that the world is not a fixed and determinate environment naively set before us (empiricism), nor absolutely constructed by a unifying consciousness (intellectualism); rather, the world lies before us to be uncovered, but nonetheless it will transcend all our descriptions.
Merleau-Ponty claims that phenomenology “slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice” (Phenomenology of Perception, xiii). Therefore, sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life” investing the perceived world with meanings and values that relate to our bodies and lives. The body’s relationship with space then, is intentional; as “I can” rather than “I think”; bodily space is a multi-layered manner of relating to things, so that the body is not “in” space but lives or inhabits it. The same is the case for sexuality and language. The philosopher discovered the body as expressive and intentional, and how its expressive unity extends to the sensible world. Merleau-Ponty develops this interpretation of the sensible through detailed studies of sensing, space, and the natural and social worlds. Sensing takes place as the “co-existence” or “communion” of the body with the world.
Further, Merleau-Ponty describing multiple psychological experiments concerning bodily orientation, depth, and movement, argues that empiricist and intellectualist accounts of space must give way to a conception of space as co-existence or mutual implication characterized by existential “levels”: our orientation toward up and down, or toward “motion” or “stationary”, is a function of the body’s adoption of a certain level within nearly an infinite number of possibilities. In this complexity of abstract and objective worlds and between the body and the world, things have sense as the correlates of my body, and reality should involve reference to perception. Because each thing owns an individual style, the world is the ultimate horizon against which any particular thing can appear. Limitations of human perception are counterpart of this world’s depth and inexhaustibly. Since human beings never correspond to the world or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely torn from it; perception essentially strives for the truth, but any truth that it reveals is circumstantial and quite uncertain. He also argues that we cannot separate certainty of our thoughts from perceptions, because to truly perceive means to have deep confidence in the veracity of perceptions. We are not transparent even to ourselves, since our inner states are available to us only in a situated and ambiguous way.
In the "Phenomenology of Perception", Merleau-Ponty quotes a passage from Proust in which the author describes, at great length, the process of “waking up.” Proust writes, “when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years”. This description, according to Merleau-Ponty, is an ontologically significant and beautiful piece of prose. The passage goes on to describe the ways which the author is unsure whether he is the mind constituting the room or it is in fact the other way around. Before an intentional consciousness foists structure on this wild Being, there is no distinct subject or object, no distinct past or present.
Rejecting classic approaches to time that treat it either as an objective property of things, as a psychological content, or as the product of transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty return to the “field of presence” as our foundational experience of time. “Time is a sense of life,” he quoting Claudel (Phenomenology of Perception, 432), he assimilates temporality with space and sexuality, highlighting aspect of subjectivity as a matter of proper analyses.
Merleau-Ponty’s account in this trajectory of phenomenological theories of time amounts to an innovative synthesis of Husserl and Heidegger’s understandings of time. The “Temporality” chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception explicitly links time to the problem of subjectivity, noting that the analysis of time cannot follow a “pre-established conception of subjectivity”. Hence, the understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality and subjectivity’s temporality should follow the “triadic” structure of the Phenomenology: reject realism and idealism to demonstrate the merits of phenomenology.
The intellectualist account of time as fails because it extracts the subject from time and reduces time to the part of consciousness. The realist account of the subject as time fails because it reduces the subject to a perpetually new present without unity to its flow. Both failures force upon the philosopher the realization that one can resolve the problem of time and subjectivity only by losing commitment to a “notion of time … as an object of our knowledge.” If one no longer can consider time “an object of our knowledge,” one must consider it a “dimension of our being”. Hence, an account of subjectivity’s temporality—of time as a dimension of our being—necessarily entails the development of a model of bodily consciousness’ pre-reflective, non-objectifying awareness beyond the “pre-established conception of subjectivity” that takes time as an object of our knowledge. This means not that “time is for someone” but that “time is someone”. What remained under thought by Husserl according to Merleau-Ponty was the inseparability of time and the subject in the theory of the living-present, so an ambiguity intentionally pervades the account of time provided in Phenomenology of Perception.
“The most important lesson the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” the philosopher advocates that one never can fully execute the phenomenological reduction. Then he starts an exploration of time as an attempt to provide an account of the structures of pre-reflective consciousness that make reflection possible, which, he believed, reveal themselves as primarily temporal. Here, understanding of time proves one of the most fundamental discoveries of Merleau-Ponty’s work.
Here time provides explanation of the structure of subjectivity because “temporal dimensions … bear each other out and ever confine themselves to making explicit what was implied in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion or thrust that is subjectivity itself”. That time is the subject and the subject is time means that the subject exists in a world that always outstrips her yet remains a world lived through by the subject.
A passive and non-objectifying synthesis takes Merleau-Ponty to a consideration of the structure of absolute time-constituting consciousness’ double-intentionality—its transcendence and self-manifestation—as the structure of time we know to be the case for two reasons. First, Merleau-Ponty tells us, “in order to become explicitly what it is implicitly, that is, consciousness, [the self] needs to unfold itself into multiplicity;” second, in addition to the distinction just implied between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, Merleau-Ponty elaborates this manner of unfolding by claiming that “what we [mean] by passive synthesis [is] that we make our way into multiplicity, but that we do not synthesize it” as intellectualist accounts of time such as Augustine’s suggest. A synthesis of the multiplicity of time’s moments and the moments of the self must be avoided because it would require a constituting consciousness that stands outside time, and “we shall never manage to understand how a … constituting subject is able to posit or become aware of itself in time.” To avoid this error of separating consciousness from that of which it is aware, Merleau-Ponty appeals to Husserl’s theory of the living-present’s absolute flow, a “[consciousness that] is the very action of temporalization—of flux, as Husserl has it—a self-anticipatory … flow which never leaves itself”.
“Le temps ets le sens de la vie,” he is quoting Claudel. His initial monologue starts with critique of an ancient notion of time, often described as a “river.” When we say that time flows or passes by, we speak of flow of time. The idea that present and future flow from the past, present is outcome of past and future is outcome of present is a fallacy, according to Merleau-Ponty. He ensures, this notion of time requires a viewer, whose gaze upon time will separate those events. Time isn’t a real process or succession that one supposed to record, time is born within one’s relationships with the objective world. Therefore, past and future exist in the present world. Later Merleau-Ponty finally admires the river metaphor, but from the standpoint of its wholeness, rather than its flow, that feeling of eternity is misguiding: eternity feeds on time.
The idea of past and future presence is explained trough the fact that the objective world is “too full for there to be time” (Phenomenology of Perception, 434). One creates the idea of past and future, merely to have more or less real support, but rather “a possibility of non-being that harmonizes with their nature.” In fact, this method doesn’t change a thing in a real world, and our memories or notions that refer don’t refer to the past at all, because one is a real carrier of the initial impression that was made one day. For example, this one pen might be significant for me, maybe it was a present from a particular person, but for many others this luggage of subjectivity is empty, since they never thought of or seen this pen in a past, therefore, making me a carrier of meaning of the past.
In the case of future, construction of the consciousness is even less possible, because “even if we in fact represent the future to ourselves with the help of what we already have seen, it remains the case that, in order to project it in front of us, we must have the sense of the future,” which leads to the idea that “the course of time must be not merely the passage of the present into the past, but also the passage of the future into the present.” Here Merleau-Ponty concludes that consciousness unfolds or consciousness time, and not the other way around, as ancient thinkers theorized; “through the ideality of time, consciousness finally cease to be imprisoned in present” (Phenomenology of Perception, 437).
Temporality is a definition of the movement of life, while simultaneously making of life a series of moments, of flowing presents and memories from the past. The temporality is important in the Phenomenology of Perception because it is our movement as existing subjects, condemned to meaning, or as it were, condemned to unfold temporally. In apprehension, what is apprehended is only apprehended in retrospection as part of the temporal flux, and that this reflection itself is in turn part of the flux. “Time must not merely be, it must come about; time is never completely constituted,” writes the philosopher. The idea of constituted time (relations to “before” and “after”) only represents the idea of time, a result of its passage. But what is the true account of time and is there a possibility of conceiving a philosophical “eternity of life”? This question attempts to grasp one dimension of Being and its appearing.
Only in contact with “the field of presence” do we learn to recognize time’s flow. There we can see how future and present sneak out into the present, when we recall it, erasing previously closed horizons. “Everything sends me back to the field of presence, as if to the original experience where time and its dimensions appear in person without any intervening distance and with ultimate evidentness” (Phenomenology of Perception, 439).
“I do not pass through a series of nows whose images I would preserve and that, placed to the end, would form a line.” Merleau-Ponty refers to a thinking of time as neither continuous nor discontinuous, but existing as an “existential eternity”. This eternity is always already there and is always “on the first day” because there is, strictly speaking, no line of “nows” that can be traced back to what would be previous days. The narrative that time presents is a synthesis of events both distant and present. This synthesis of events, however, is not active; one cannot refer back to a point in the past where one says, “I will create a memory and a reference point in this ‘now’ which I will refer back to sometime in the future.” Rather, there is a “passive synthesis” of time, a seeming contradiction in terms that Merleau-Ponty explains by reference to a contact with “wild Being” prior to subject and object. “For every moment that arrives, the previous moment suffers a modification: I still hold it in hand, it is still there, and yet it already sinks back, it descends beneath the line of presents. In order to keep hold on it, I must reach across a thin layer of time. It is still clearly the same one, and I have the power of meeting up with it such it was, I’m not cut off from it; but then again it would not be past if nothing has changed, it begins to appear prospectively against or to project itself upon my present, whereas just a moment ago it in fact was my present” (Phenomenology of Perception, 439).
Time exists for us only because we have a present (Phenomenology of Perception, 447). Though present time acquires its individuality, which allows it to move later in time and “will give us the illusion of eternity,” explains the philosopher. The present (with its horizons of past and future) has a “privileged status” because that is where being and consciousness coincide. We only communicate with ourselves through the communication with the world.
Hence, temporalization plays a central role in our understanding of time. Temporalization, according to Merleau-Ponty, satisfies two conditions: (a) makes clear that “I am” not the author of time, (b) “I am” not the one who takes the initiative of temporalization, but no matter what I do, since I’m born. Therefore, he makes a conclusion, that time flows through him. “Time tears me away from what I was about to be, but simultaneously gives me the means of grasping myself from a distance and of actualizing myself as myself” (Phenomenology of Perception, 451). Once we acquired spontaneity, once and for all and that “is perpetuated in being as the result of being acquired” – is that precisely time and precisely subjectivity, he concludes from a Sartrean remark, further claiming, that time “is the foundation and the measure of our spontaneity”.
In this nuanced attempt to provide an account of the form of intentionality presupposed by all experience, the phenomenology of time-consciousness provides important contributions to philosophical issues such as perception, memory, expectation, imagination, habituation, self-awareness, and self-identity over time. “We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time,” Merleau-Ponty wrote. Within the phenomenological movement, time-consciousness is central. In this conception of time as field of presence, which “reveals the subject and the object as two abstract moments of a unique structure, namely, presence”, Merleau-Ponty sees the resolution to many problems of transcendence as well as the foundation for human freedom. Against the Sartrean position that freedom is either total or null, Merleau-Ponty holds that freedom emerges only against the background of our “universal engagement in a world”, which involves us in meanings and values that are not of our choosing (contra-Sartre).
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of human temporality has a specific notion and theoretical utility denied to both existentialism and psychological determinism. His conception allows for a dissonance between the perceptual temporality of the body and the temporality of personal life that parallels the possibility of ambiguity in spatial organization.
“The solution to all the problems of transcendence is found in the thickness of the pre-objective present, where we find our corporeality, our sociality, and the preexistence of the world, that is, where we find the starting point for “explanations” to the extent that they are legitimate – and at the same time the foundation of our freedom,” concludes Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 457).
