The Primacy Question in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology

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The Primacy Question in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty’s existential reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, in particular as this

was initially formulated in Phenomenology of Perception and related writings from the mid-1940s,

bears the impress of a notably diverse range of intellectual sources. Weaving phenomenological and

broader philosophical claims together with empirical scientific results as well as themes drawn from

fields such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Christian theology, among others, this position can be

viewed as a ‘Gordian knot’ in the sense of an indefinite multiplicity of conceptual threads that are

not easily disentangled, nor perhaps even disentangleable at all.

For some readers this ‘knottiness’ is entirely salutary, reflecting what they regard as the broad

compass and rich fecundity of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘philosophy of ambiguity’, virtues that would be

lost to dissective analysis. Many others, however, find the situation objectionable, taking it as be-

traying an untenable conceptual muddle that can only be fixed, if at all, by dismissing or discounting

some of the incongruous strands. Thus, for example, most philosophical commentary on Merleau-

Ponty ignores his commitment to Marxism and the religious background of his thought. And while

some readers emphasize Merleau-Ponty’s identification with the transcendental tradition and down-

play his use of empirical science, others foreground the latter and either disregard the ostensible

transcendentalism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, or else construe it in metascientific terms.

This interpretive discordance concerning Merleau-Ponty’s mixed adherence to transcendental

and empirical reasoning is particularly salient with regard to his phenomenological account of em-

bodiment. There is much at stake here—for example, whether claims concerning pre-reflective in-

tentionality are assimilable to the naturalistic framework of contemporary science. Conclusively to

resolve this disagreement would require an analytically clear articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s exis-

tential phenomenology that nonetheless respects its complex texture. Not an easy task, but such is

Bryan Smyth, University of Mississippi [email protected]

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the guiding intention of this article. Approaching Merleau-Ponty’s project as a Gordian knot in the

sense described above, my aim will be to cut through its seeming intractability by addressing what I

shall call the primacy question—the question as to what, if anything, is to be accorded ‘primacy’

within the project, taking this as literally as possible in the sense of logical priority.1 The idea is that

this will provide clarificatory insight into the relation between empirical science and transcendental

philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment.

The discussion will unfold as follows: (1) I first consider Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of

perception, and show that this harbors a problematic ambiguity such that there is no single coherent

sense of perception that could have primacy within his existential phenomenology. (2) This situation

illustrates that within phenomenology, primacy necessarily pertains to methodological grounding—

the ‘productivity’ that actuates and sustains the project. This is the self-referential theme of ‘the

phenomenology of phenomenology’, and it suggests two broad ways of answering the primacy

question, either in terms of reflection or embodiment on the part of the phenomenologist. But in re-

affirming dualism, these alternatives disavow Merleau-Ponty’s position, which rests upon a prior

holistic unity. (3) To shed light on this, I consider the work of neurologist Kurt Goldstein and argue

that his ‘organismic’ conception of biology provided Merleau-Ponty with a scientific model for

grasping human existence holistically, and thus in particular for coming to grips with phenomenolo-

gy’s methodological self-reference. Crucially, primacy in this model pertains to a moment of norma-

tive imaginative practice that produces the organismic Gestalt, in terms of the eidetic apriority of

which alone sense can be made of empirical biological facts. (4) I then consider the analogous role

1 Although there is a seemingly obvious answer to the primacy question, viz., perception, as we shall see this tends to reflect the problematic ‘knottiness’ at issue—which, even if there is something positive to be said about it, should nonetheless be amenable to this sort of analysis, if it indeed has a legitimate claim on our philosophical attention.


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played by imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual synthesis in the form of what he

called ‘projection’, and show that, parallel to Goldstein, the projection of the organismic Gestalt is

methodologically central to his account of embodiment, and thus the site of primacy in his existen-

tial-phenomenological project. (5) In light of this result, I clarify, by way of conclusion, the relation

within Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment between natural science and transcendental philos-

ophy. What we find is that while the theoretical dimension of the latter – the eidetic apriority of the

organismic Gestalt – is coupled dialectically with empirical facts on an epistemically equal basis,

these are jointly subordinated to the normative commitments implied by the projection of that Ge-

stalt. The primacy of the latter is transcendental but in a distinct practical sense, such that any sub-

stantive discrepancy between science and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology reflects metaphilosoph-

ical, not theoretical, disagreement.

1. Merleau-Ponty and the Primacy of Perception

It is well known that Merleau-Ponty articulated the main results of Phenomenology of Perception in

terms of the thesis of ‘the primacy of perception’.2 By this expression he wished to convey

that the experience of perception returns us to the very moment at which things, truths, and

values are constituted for us, that it gives us a logos in the nascent state, that it teaches us,

outside of all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself, that it reminds us of the

tasks of knowledge and action.3

2 See Merleau-Ponty (1996). 3 Ibid., p. 67.


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This statement expresses a broad claim through several closely related ideas. The central point,

however, is that perceptual experience is “privileged” because here “the perceived object is by defi-

nition present and living.”4 Attending to perception thus serves “to recover the consciousness of ra-

tionality” – something of which ordinary experience is naïvely oblivious – by disclosing the original

emergence of rationality and the remarkable achievement that that represents—viz., the advent of

intersubjectively valid meaning.5 This disclosure – and the break with the ‘natural attitude’ in gen-

eral – involves a sort of Gestalt-switch whereby rationality, rather than being taken for granted as

part of the background of experience, is itself “made to appear against a background of inhuman

nature.” This move disaffirms “le préjugé du monde,” the naïve assumption of the pregivenness of

an objectively determinate world,6 thereby opening up the perceptual field as a “primordial” level of

experience in virtue of manifesting the pre-rational situation of generally discordant perspectivity, or

non-sense in Merleau-Pontian terms. This is not a situation of utter meaninglessness—there is

meaning for-me, say, but not yet for-us. This is what Merleau-Ponty meant in saying that perception

“reveals the permanent terms of the problem that culture attempts to resolve.”7 For Merleau-Ponty,

this problem is “the human problem” or “the problem of human coexistence,” which poses the task

of establishing “human relations among men,” relations of universality in a common world.8 To

adapt a thought from Humanism and Terror, concerning perception “our task is to clarify [and] em-

4 Ibid., p. 68; cf. Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xi): perception is “defined for us as access to the truth.” 5 Rationality is the “marvel [prodige] of the connection of experiences” (1945, p. xvi). “To say that there exists

rationality is to say that perspectives overlap [se recoupent], perceptions confirm one another [se confirment], a meaning [sens] appears” (ibid., p. xv).

6 Ibid., pp. 11, 62, 296, 316. 7 Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 67-68). 8 Merleau-Ponty (1947, pp. 103, xi).


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phasize […] the true terms of the human problem.”9 The primacy of perception thus refers to the

precedence of non-sense over sense. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the perceived world is the

always presupposed background of all rationality, all value, and all existence,”10 which as such con-

ditions them all indelibly.

Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception clearly makes a negative epistemic claim

by way of emphasizing the fallibility and limits of human consciousness and knowledge. Specifical-

ly, in claiming that “all consciousness is perceptual consciousness,”11 he denied the existence of “a

logically coherent thought or a thought of pure being,”12 thereby repudiating the traditional preten-

sion of philosophy to have an absolute access to reality unconditioned by the vicissitudes of per-

spectival non-sense. In doing so, however, Merleau-Ponty did not wish to discard notions like objec-

tivity or rationality, but rather to invite new conceptions of them that would emphasize their con-

crete historicity in perceptual and intersubjective terms—and he claimed that this was fully congru-

ent with contemporary developments in the philosophy of science.13

But what is the positive claim made by Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception?

Upon scrutiny this proves unexpectedly elusive. It certainly does not amount to the reductive view

of modern empiricism—about this Merleau-Ponty was very clear.14 Equally clear, though, is that he

did not use the term ‘perception’ in any standard way.15 Rather, as opposed to “perception properly

9 Ibid., p. 196. 10 Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 43). 11 Ibid., p. 42. 12 Ibid., p. 54. 13 Ibid., pp. 56-58. 14 E.g., ibid., p. 67. 15 See Madison (1992).


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speaking,” which he also referred to as “empirical,” “secondary,” or “analytical” perception,16 and

which is a matter of “the explicit acts through which I posit an object at a distance in front of me, in

a definite relation with other objects and endowed with definite observable characteristics,”17 Mer-

leau-Ponty qualifies the sense he is chiefly interested in as “natural perception,” which “does not

posit the things it concerns, it does not put them at a distance in order to observe them, [rather] it

lives with them.”18 Merleau-Ponty also calls this “originary” perception,19 and I shall do likewise.

More on this below. For now, let us just note that this new signification of the term ‘perception’

poses certain terminological ambiguities that contribute to the difficulty of determining the positive

sense of its claimed primacy. For example, is the ‘of’ in ‘the experience of perception’ to be under-

stood subjectively or objectively? Does that phrase, in other words, refer to an experience that per-

tains to and occurs within something called perception, or rather to a meta-level experience that has

‘perception’ as its theme? ‘The perceived world’ involves a related ambiguity—is this the field of

primordial non-sense considered in its own right? Is it the sum-total of perceived things, or does it

refer rather to the horizons within which the perception of such things occurs? In what sense is the

perceived world a world at all?

Questions along these lines can be multiplied in vain. I submit, however, that these terminolog-

ical difficulties issue from a deeper ambiguity concerning the import of the thesis of the primacy of

perception itself—specifically, does it make an ontological or an epistemic claim?20 It is tempting to

16 Merleau-Ponty (1945, pp. 53, 24). 17 Ibid., p. 395. 18 Ibid., p. 371, italics added. 19 Ibid., p. 279. 20 Cf. Geraets (1976). That it can’t make both an ontological and an epistemic claim seems to go without saying—it

is a question of primacy, after all, which by its nature can’t be shared or apportioned in that way. It might be ob-jected that Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception serves to break down the usual distinction between ontological


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read Merleau-Ponty’s account of the primacy of perception as hedging on this question in the fol-

lowing way: perceptual experience is an ontologically ‘primordial’ and therefore an epistemically

‘privileged’ level of experience. But this will not do. For in the phenomenological context, the expe-

rience upon which philosophical claims are made is not simply given, but rather involves a mode of

givenness that depends methodologically upon the performance of the phenomenological reduction

(the above-mentioned Gestalt-switch in the case of Merleau-Ponty). This raises many large issues.

Here I will limit myself to affirming that even if there are positive ways in which the content of

phenomenologically-reduced experience could be construed as ontologically primordial and/or epis-

temically privileged, it would nonetheless be specious to accord it primacy in any but a weak rela-

tive sense. For it is, after all, methodologically dependent upon (hence logically posterior to) that

which effects its disclosure, for which reason it would be more appropriate to locate primacy there.

And this seems especially applicable to Merleau-Ponty’s non-standard view of perception. Since

even while it is postulated as an antecedent experience, as an object of philosophical investigation it

is never experienced in its antecedence. It may thus be a kind of ‘past that was never present’,21 but

that would be clearly inconsistent with any serious claim to primacy.22

2. The Primacy of Method

and epistemological claims. As we shall see, something like this is in fact the case. It’s just that it will be in terms of the resulting view that originary perception can be understood, not the converse.

21 See Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 280); cf. Merleau-Ponty’s example of Earth’s origin: “Laplace’s nebula is not be-hind us, at our origin, but rather in front of us in the cultural world” (ibid., p. 494).

22 This is not to confuse logical with temporal priority, but simply to recognize that even if something is held to be ontologically primordial in some sense, that is a separate issue from its having primacy. The point is simply that if (unlike perception in classical empiricism, for example) special means are required to access philosophically what is deemed primordial, then there is a stronger case to be made for locating primacy there, in the means and its ground, rather than in what it serves to reveal.


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The following claim is, I submit, inescapable: primacy within phenomenology necessarily pertains

to methodology.23 Granting this, it may be thought that the best way to answer the primacy question

is to read between the lines and foreground Merleau-Ponty’s methodological commitment to “radi-

cal reflection,”24 that is, reflection’s awareness of “its own dependence on an unreflective life which

is its initial, constant, and final situation.”25 Although it may seem contrary to the spirit of Merleau-

Ponty’s phenomenology to accord primacy to reflection, doing so need not introduce any foreign

ideas, and it actually squares well with his own account of the primacy of perception, as described

above, in the sense of its negative claims vis-à-vis reflection. It just goes a step further by making

explicit the implicit methodological move: “we must not only set ourselves up in a reflective attitude

[…] but also reflect on this reflection, [so as to] understand the natural situation that it is aware of

succeeding and which therefore forms part of its definition.”26 The idea here is to uphold in a broad

sense the epistemic priority of perception over philosophical reflection, while recognizing that with-

in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology the ground for this priority (and hence primacy) pertains to a

cognitive initiative on the part of the phenomenologist.

Though cogent, this view may still be found wanting. In particular, many readers of Merleau-

Ponty would want to reply that the methodological notion of ‘radical reflection’ as he takes this up

is by no means a matter of free-floating intellection as it might be in, say, Husserl. Rather, the reply

would be that for Merleau-Ponty even radical reflection is ultimately an embodied activity in that it

23 This may well hold more generally, but I won’t make an argument to that effect here. 24 See especially Herbenick (1973), although I do not follow his analysis. 25 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. ix). 26 Ibid., p. 75. “Radical reflection is that which seizes me [me ressaisit] while I am in the process of forming and

formulating the ideas of subject and object, it brings to light the source of these two ideas, it is reflection not only in an operative sense, but it is also conscious of itself in its operation” (ibid., p. 253).


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ultimately relies upon the exercise of certain pre-cognitive corporeal capacities.27 This is a way of

affirming a ‘fleshier’ response to the primacy question: not by tracing the disclosure of perception

back to radical reflection and stopping there, but rather by taking that a step further by claiming that

such reflection is itself still a certain manner of ‘living the body’.28 At least since his 1936 discus-

sion of Marcel, Merleau-Ponty held the experience of le corps propre as the paradigm of pre-

objective experience and thus as the prototype of a “general method” for “a new type of

knowledge.”29 This method is worked out in the first main part of Phenomenology of Perception,

which Merleau-Ponty summarized in saying that “we have relearned to sense our body; we have

discovered, beneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that

we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies.”30 This provides the methodo-

logical basis for “relearning to see the world”31 inasmuch as

the thing and the world are given to me with the parts of my body [mon corps] […] in a

living connection that is comparable, or rather identical, to that which exists among the

parts of my body itself [mon corps lui-même]. External perception and the perception of

the body itself [le corps propre] vary together because they are the two sides of a single

act.32

27 See especially Gendlin (1992). 28 “The task of a radical reflection […] consists […] in recovering the unreflective experience of the world in order

to put the attitude of verification and reflective operations back into it, and to make reflection appear as one of the possibilities of my being” (1945, p. 278, italics added).

29 Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 38). 30 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 239). 31 See ibid., p. xvi. 32 Ibid., p. 237.


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Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment is thus immanently methodological, and has methodologi-

cal purchase on the perceived world for that reason—perhaps the rationale for his claim that Phe-

nomenology of Perception was a “preliminary” work that aimed (merely) “to define a method for

getting closer to present and living being.”33 The idea here is that rather than pointing to (radical)

reflection within Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, the necessity of assigning primacy to

methodological considerations would identify corporeality as its proper site in the sense that the

body and its vital functions are what make perception as well as its phenomenological investigation

possible in the first place.34

These two approaches to the primacy question are not as different as they might seem. For they

can agree that the answer to the question is ‘radical reflection’, understood as a catchphrase for Mer-

leau-Ponty’s phenomenological methodology. Their disagreement concerns the status of radical re-

flection vis-à-vis corporeality. Although both approaches are plausible, the one emphasizing embod-

iment has the advantage of grounding the disclosure of perception in something that is, at least os-

tensibly, ontologically coeval, whereas the alternative clearly if inadvertently affirms an unaccepta-

ble form of mind-body dualism.

Yet avoiding such dualism by cleaving to the body erases any moment of distinctly philosophi-

cal reflection. After all, the point of grounding the latter corporeally is to locate it in the anonymous

or pre-personal dimension of embodiment, i.e., the body itself, rather than the body understood per-

sonally, i.e., as my body. Unless we want to say – dubiously, I think – that phenomenology is carried

33 Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 68). 34 Sheets-Johnstone’s idea of “the primacy of movement” (1999) is formally similar to views like that of Gendlin

(1992) concerning “the primacy of the body” (1992), although it is based on a sharper critique of Merleau-Ponty. More broadly, these views are also formally similar to those which, with regard to Merleau-Pontian phenome-nology, would locate primacy in intercorporeality (e.g., Adams 2007).


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out in a wholly passive way, this is a serious problem.35 Yet to avoid this problem leads to equivoca-

tion concerning the body – witness the conflation of ‘mon corps’ with ‘mon corps lui-même’ and ‘le

corps propre’ in the above quotation – which, in reflecting the subject-object dichotomy of mind-

body dualism, effectively reintroduces the latter through the back door.

Thus, even if intuitively more plausible, corporeality does not support a sounder answer to the

primacy question than radical reflection. Each approach ultimately reaffirms the dualism of which

the answer we are seeking would be the ground. What is needed, then, is a framework that will ena-

ble us to capture this prior unity unequivocally, and on that basis to come to terms with how Mer-

leau-Ponty’s phenomenology achieved methodological self-reference.

3. Goldstein and Biological Science

To this end, I shall consider Kurt Goldstein’s conception of biological science. It can easily be

shown that Goldstein’s work played a significant role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s exis-

tential interpretation, beginning with The Structure of Behavior, and it was arguably of singular im-

portance with regard to his treatment of human embodiment.36 I cannot discuss this in detail here. I

shall just outline the methodological significance for Merleau-Ponty’s project of Goldstein’s con-

ception of biology as a natural science of lived existence that is rigorously empirical yet which

views itself as ultimately resting – and this because of its commitment to unbiased empirical evi-

dence – on a moment of transcendental apriority.

35 The question here is whether the reduction is understood as an active and deliberate effort, an act of freedom, however conditioned, or else as an event that happens to or befalls someone. Concerning Merleau-Ponty, Heinämma argues for the latter: “the epochē is not our accomplishment but something that happens to us” (2002, p. 146). This view, however, overstates the influence that Eugen Fink had on Merleau-Ponty (see Smyth 2011).

36 Although Geraets (1971, p. 12) noted that “the major event in the development of [Merleau-Ponty’s] research was his reading of Goldstein’s book, Der Aufbau des Organismus,” little has been written on this connection. But see Pintos (2005) and Noble (2014, pp. 7-52). On Goldstein’s connection with phenomenology, see Gold-stein (1967, pp. 162-163; 1971a, 11); Harrington (1996, pp. 146, 157f); but cf. Spiegelberg (1972, pp. 301-318).


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Goldstein’s conception of biology as presented in his principal work, Der Aufbau des Organ-

ismus, is typically regarded as unusually ‘philosophical’ for the work of a scientist.37 This is because

its development pivoted around one central epistemological problem, to wit, how to determine the

proper object of biological science. As a neurologist, Goldstein’s scientific interests originally lay in

that specialized field. But the wealth of empirical experience he gained in diagnosing and treating

thousands of brain-injured soldiers led him to see the artificiality and abstractness of any such partial

perspective, and to recognize the need for a holistic approach. Goldstein did not have any a priori

commitment to holism—indeed, then as now, it was regarded with some suspicion from the stand-

point of the prevailing atomist and reductionist assumptions of modern science. But for Goldstein, it

ultimately proved impossible to make empirically sound correlations between his patients’ physical

injuries taken in isolation and their psychological symptom complexes. This supported the rejection

of any form of strong localization theory in neurology. Moreover, and more importantly, it affirmed

the necessity, beyond treating the central nervous system as an anatomical whole, to treat the patient

him- or herself as an existential whole, that is, as an integral psychosomatic unity striving to realize

optimally its capacities in “coming to terms” – its “Auseinanderstezung” – with its environment.

Goldstein’s contention was that injury or disease and their effects could only be properly identified

and rendered intelligible within the context of the life of the patient taken in its totality—and this,

not just synchronically, but in terms of its overall diachronic unfolding. This implies an at least heu-

ristic sense of ‘end’ or weak inner purposiveness such that, in Goldstein’s terms, the proper object of

biology – and a fortiori neurology and any other specialized discipline concerned with organic reali-

ty – is the individual organism in its on-going process of essential ‘self-realization’.

37 See Goldstein (1967, p. 161; 1995, pp. 384-385); also Jonas (1959); Sacks (1995); Noppeney (2000; 2001).


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I shall briefly gloss the core of Goldstein’s developed view below. But first there is the general

question as to how one might gain scientific knowledge of the organism so construed. Goldstein was

clear that the only legitimate way to do so was on the basis of empirical facts (e.g., reflex phenome-

na) acquired through analytic methods. Yet he also insisted that these so-called ‘facts’ need to be

taken with a significant dose of skepticism. For while they do pertain to the organism in some way,

the glimpse they offer is necessarily partial and hence abstract—no particular empirical fact can

even be taken as a self-evident indication of health or pathology, let alone any more specific claim.

Bare facts are always equivocal, and so even though they provide the necessary material for biologi-

cal knowledge, they are in principle insufficient to serve as its epistemic ground. “We deny […] the

possibility of gaining biological knowledge on the sole basis of the phenomena that can be deter-

mined by the analytic methods.”38 For Goldstein, then, such knowledge is not achieved through any

sort of inductive reasoning based exclusively on empirical facts.

The problem is how to distinguish non-arbitrarily those empirical facts that are biologically rel-

evant and thus truly disclosive of the organism, from those which are merely artifacts of the isola-

tion effected by disease, injury or experimental conditions, and which as such stand in need of ex-

planation based upon knowledge of the organism. Goldstein’s view was that “the criterion of that

relevancy can be offered only by a conception of the organism in its qualitative functioning and ho-

listic functioning.”39 This calls for what he referred to as the Urbild or eidetic ‘prototype’ of the or-

ganism, the Gestalt of its intrinsic structure that would serve as the Erkenntnisgrund of biological

knowledge.40 This would not base the latter on any sort of deduction from broader metaphysical as-

38 Goldstein (1995, p. 306); “I […] deny that biological phenomena, particularly human existence, can be under-stood by application of the method of natural sciences” (1971a, p. 11).

39 Goldstein (1995, p. 306; 1971c, p. 440). 40 Goldstein (1940, pp. 23-24; 1995, pp. 312-314, 386f).


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sumptions.41 It is precisely any such recourse to illicit speculation that Goldstein – aware of it in

other forms of holist thought at the time – wished to avoid. But other forms of holism were not the

main problem. For standard non-holist empirical science was necessarily – if unwittingly – guilty of

such speculation, in that they had to have some operative criterion of relevance which could only be

based on an unfounded assumption as to the (‘normal’) nature of biology’s object. Goldstein thus

charted a middle course between induction and deduction, which, though seemingly contrary, coin-

cide in terms of presupposing the knowledge they were ostensibly seeking, and consequently of

playing fast and loose with empirical evidence.

The salient point here is the disapprobative association of analytic approaches with speculative

holism. Yet how can Goldstein do better? Specifically, in trying to arrive at an empirically support-

ed apprehension of the organismic Urbild that does not rely directly upon empirical facts, how can

he avoid the circularity characterizing the alternatives? This is Goldstein’s basic epistemological

problem. Reflecting on his own research, and drawing on contemporary work in the philosophy of

science,42 he solved it by arguing that the cognitive process of scientific thought in general, and of

biology’s grasp of the organismic Urbild in particular, involves a dimension of symbolization that is

based on an activity of creative imagination occurring in response to and in the light of empirical

experience. And his preferred figure for this activity was Goethe. “Biological knowledge is contin-

ued creative activity, by which the idea of organism comes increasingly within reach of our experi-

41 Gurwitsch (1940, p. 265) suggested – misleadingly, I think – that there was a latent Platonism in Goldstein’s thought.

42 Especially Cassirer’s work, including his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, parts of which were based upon his interpretation of Goldstein’s results (the two were cousins).


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ence. It is a sort of ideation equivalent to Goethe’s ‘Schau’, a procedure that springs continuously

from empirical facts and never fails to be grounded in and substantiated by them.”43

Goldstein frequently made brief but significant gestures toward Goethe in this way.44 Then as

now, they indicate a broadly anti-Newtonian opposition to scientific reductionism which, then as

now, is typically regarded as scientifically derisible.45 Goldstein was aware of this and these ges-

tures are not to be overstated. Goldstein did not endorse wholesale a Goethean conception of sci-

ence. But he did want vigorously to endorse a specific aspect of that view, to wit, that science, and

biology especially, involves a “special procedure of cognition” – this activity of creative imagina-

tion – that is “similar to the procedure of the artist.”46 For this is how he could respond in a coherent

(and, pace Gurwitsch, non-Platonic) way to the problem as to how the Urbild of the organism could

be grasped on the basis of empirical facts and yet be relatively autonomous of them. The underlying

point is that for Goldstein primacy (to put it in the terms of the present discussion) pertains neither

to the facts nor to the Urbild as such, but rather to the praxis of imaginative projection on the part of

the biologist that brings them together symbolically such that “the description of the nature of the

organism grows increasingly close to the content of our experience.”47

43 Goldstein (1995, p. 307; see also 1940, p. 24). 44 E.g., Goldstein (1940, p. 24; 1995, pp. 307, 315f, 386f; 1971b). Cf. Gurwitsch (1940, pp. 249, 259); Ulrich

(1968); Harrington (1996, pp. 162-163). 45 It would take us too far afield to get into the details of the alternative that Goethe posed to the Newtonian model

of science. For an overview, see Heitler (1998), Zajonc (1998), Wahl (2005), and Ebach (2005). On some affini-ties between Goethe and phenomenology, see Simms (2005).

46 Goldstein (1940, p. 23, italics added) 47 Goldstein (1971c, p. 441). It could be argued that, anti-Newtonian connotations aside, Goldstein’s allusions to

Goethe are incidental in that philosophically this perspective and the role of imagination within it has ultimately more to do with Kant. Something like this is certainly true – consider Riese’s comment that “Goldstein’s work could be considered a broad empirical verification of the Kantian idea of the organism” (1938, p. 96) – but it is too large an issue to explore here (although I shall make brief reference to Kant below).


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Although this conception might appear ‘mystical’ or otherwise dubious from the standpoint of

empirical science, Goldstein, whose own empirical credentials were solid, intended it to be not just

consistent with empiricism, but exemplarily empirical. For it enables one to adopt a fully positive

approach in the sense of denying the admissibility of negative phenomena such as privative facts or

antagonistic tensions. It is only on the basis of arbitrarily preconceived biological norms that such

phenomena could be considered, and for Goldstein this implies a distorted engagement with experi-

ential evidence. Undistorted engagement with this evidence requires that the organismic Urbild be

formed solely in conjunction with a precise description of all phenomena, and without preconcep-

tions as to their relative significance—something Merleau-Ponty may well have had in mind in con-

struing phenomenology’s eidetic method as a “phenomenological positivism.”48 The knowledge that

results is not for that reason to be regarded as less exact or accurate than other conceptions would

have it, but Goldstein did concede that biological knowledge is in principle an open-ended dialecti-

cal process. If it goes well there will be increasing adequation between the idea of the organism and

its reality, but this process is – as Merleau-Ponty would later likewise affirm with regard to phe-

nomenology – essentially incomplete.49

The most important motivation for Goldstein’s affirming a central role for productive imagina-

tion had to do with methodological justification. He did view Der Aufbau des Organismus (as Mer-

leau-Ponty viewed Phenomenology of Perception) as essentially a work of methodology.50 Yet this

48 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xii; cf. 1964, p. 50). 49 Goldstein (1940, p. 30; 1971c, p. 441; 1995, pp. 313, 340, 387); Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xvi). 50 Goldstein (1995, pp. 17-18). And Merleau-Ponty shared this view. In a letter to Goldstein (30 April 1950) con-

cerning the French translation of Der Aufbau des Organismus, which appeared, following Ricœur’s translation of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, as the second volume in the Bibliothèque de Philosophie series co-edited by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the latter claimed that this order-ing was intended to show “the fruitfulness of combining ‘pure’ philosophy with ‘positive’ knowledge” (cited in Harrington 1996, pp. 158, 257n79). As the publisher’s blurb (approved if not written by Merleau-Ponty) put it, “here one will see what could be – rigorously applied to positive knowledge – a ‘phenomenological’ method that


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raises meta-level questions as to the method used there, questions that can lead to a vicious regress.

The appeal to the imagination, however, lays out an existential continuum in which biological

knowledge appears as a form of biological being.51 For it is likewise in the imagination that the

‘productivity’ exhibited in the course of the self-realization of the organism, in its Auseinander-

setzung with its environment, is rooted. Goldstein’s best-known claims coalesce around this point:

successful human self-realization hinges on what he called the ‘abstract attitude’, the ability to step

back from given actuality in order to reckon with the possible, the virtual, the symbolic, and so on.

This is the capacity to “transcend the situation” in order to survey it and give one’s own account of

its essential features—in other words, to form and (crucially) to alter perceived Gestalten.52 In this

way, human self-realization can in general be understood in terms of holistic comportment anchored

on the activity of productive imagination that animates the abstract attitude.53 On this basis, Gold-

stein could claim that “the attainment of biological knowledge we are seeking is essentially akin to

[…] the capacity of the organism to become adequate to its environmental conditions.”54 The same

kind of ‘productivity’ is manifested across the board—indeed, Goldstein’s preferred analogy was

with the mundane process of learning to ride a bicycle.55 Biological knowledge is structurally anal-

ogous to the existence it thematizes because the creative activity at its heart is “essentially related to

is more often celebrated than practiced.” Later, in “Goldstein et la biologie,” Merleau-Ponty referred to Gold-stein’s magnum opus in terms of its important “epistemological lesson” (1956, p. 438).

51 Goldstein (1995, pp. 306-308). 52 Goldstein (1940, pp. 43-68; 1995, pp. 44-45); Goldstein and Scheerer (1941). The terms I shall use for these

capacities are Gestaltung and Umgestaltung, although the meaning of the latter can be rolled into the former. 53 It merits emphasizing that the abstract attitude in no way corresponds to mind as opposed to body (and converse-

ly for the ‘concrete attitude’), but is rather a feature of the organism as a whole, something shown clearly in the pathological case studies on which Goldstein and his collaborators based their claims about the abstract attitude, where its diminishment was self-evidently occasioned by (but irreducible to) physical injury (e.g., brain lesion).

54 Goldstein (1995, pp. 307-308). 55 Goldstein (1940, p. 24; 1995, p. 308); cf. Harrington (1996, p. 163).


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the activity whereby the organism comes to terms with the surrounding world so as to be able to re-

alize itself, that is, exist. Biological knowledge reproduces in a conscious way the approach of the

living organism.”56 It is a matter of biological self-reference that enables Goldstein to achieve a

methodological closure that enfolds his own scientific work within its object domain in such a way

as to obviate any insoluble meta-level questions, and to confirm the praxis of imaginative Gestal-

tung as the site of primacy within that work.

4. Merleau-Ponty and the Primacy of Projection

I shall now argue that Merleau-Ponty’s view of phenomenological self-reference is modelled on

Goldstein’s account of biological self-reference, and that mutatis mutandis primacy in the former

runs parallel to what we have seen in the latter. To this end, I will consider Merleau-Ponty’s account

of synthesis in originary perception to reveal the fundamental role therein of productive imagination

in the form of what he called “the function of ‘projection’,” and then show the methodological cen-

trality of this function to the productivity of phenomenology itself, and thus as providing the answer

to the primacy question.

In originary perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, “the perceived object is by definition present

and living.”57 It is also the case, however, that the perceived object is never entirely given—indeed,

this is a condition of its ‘present and living’ reality: “the things that I see are things for me only on

the condition that they always withdraw beyond their graspable aspects,”58 that is, beyond what is

56 Goldstein (1971c, p. 441, italics added); “Medicine […] is a kind of artistic enterprise and so mirrors the nature of man” (1971a, p. 153); “Subject matter and method are interrelated” (1995, p.29).

57 Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 68). 58 Ibid., p. 49.


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immediately given. In the context of perspectival non-sense, the flow of sensory adumbrations is

always evidentially inadequate for the emergence of discretely unified objects. Central to Merleau-

Ponty’s account is that perception is shot through with a paradoxical combination of presence and

absence, or immanence and transcendence: “immanence, because the perceived cannot be foreign to

the perceiver; and transcendence, because it always involves something beyond what is given at the

moment.”59 Without recourse to pregiven concepts, or even Husserl’s idea of a noematic nucleus,

Merleau-Ponty claimed that perceptual synthesis can and does nonetheless occur on the basis of the

concrete manner in which perspectives unfold temporally, that there is an open yet still relatively

solid structure latent within the perceptual flow.60 In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, this structure is the

“style” of a thing, and it is what “reveals [it] in its suchness or carnal particularity.”61 The integral

“totality” of a perceived object emerges as the synthetic aggregate of an open and indefinite series of

partial perspectival views “which confirm one another according to a certain style, which defines the

object in question.”62 The coherence and provisional stability that characterize the result of this per-

ceptual synthesis are practical in that they are based on the corporeal or motor responses that experi-

ence elicits. “Style establishes the perceptual field as a sphere of activity,” and it is in this way that

Merleau-Ponty described “the emergent character of perceptual unification which can never be per-

fectly reconstituted in thought.”63

These ideas are familiar to readers of Merleau-Ponty, yet how his notion of style works is not

always fully appreciated. Relevant here is the affinity between the perception of style and the Kanti-

59 Ibid. 60 This is the sense in which, for Merleau-Ponty, matter is “pregnant with its form” (1945, p. 337; 1996, p. 48). 61 Singer (1981, p. 159); cf. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wood’ example (1945, p. 514). 62 Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 49). 63 Singer (1981, pp. 160-162).


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an notion of reflecting judgment,64 and the mediating and unifying role played therein, in the ab-

sence of a subsuming concept, by the productive imagination. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty held

that this has a general pre-objective epistemic priority over conceptual reason.65 As he summarized:

if there can be an awareness of “a harmony between the sensible and the concept […] which is itself

without any concept,” and if the subject of this awareness is not a universal thinker but a perceiving

body, then “the hidden art of the imagination66 must condition categorial activity. It is no longer

merely aesthetic judgment, but knowledge as well which rests upon this art, an art which forms the

basis of the unity of consciousness.”67 This is consistent with his claims about the primacy of per-

ception because he locates this role of imagination within it: “the same creative capacity which is at

work in imagination and ideation is germinally present in the first human perception.”68

The point here is that the perception of x presupposes the perception of the style of x, and that

the latter occurs on the basis of a prior moment of productive imagination. Originary perceptual syn-

thesis hinges on the imposition of style as a background for a given manifold of pre-predicative ex-

periential adumbrations, through which they first gain meaningful reality. Together with the claim

(see above) that originary perception, rather than positing things, lives with them, this view involves

a reinterpretation of Husserlian Urdoxa in terms of the content or ‘aboutness’ of an operatively in-

tentional directedness toward the world.69 Originary perception can be understood as “sustaining”

64 See Kant (2000, p. 5:179). 65 See especially Coole (1984). 66 See Kant (1998, p. A141/B180f): “This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their

mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul [eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele], whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty.”

67 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. xii; cf. p. 65). 68 Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 99-100). 69 This point merits closer attention, inasmuch as it is widely held within Merleau-Ponty scholarship that his view

of bodily intentionality excludes aboutness (Reuter 1999, pp. 75-76), that “it is impossible to distinguish the con-tent of motor intentional activity from the attitude directed toward that content” (Kelly 2002, p. 387). Recogniz-


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empirical perception, and consciousness in general, through “a deeper function without which per-

ceived objects would lack the index of reality […] and through which they begin to count or to be

valid for us. This is the movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the world

prior to any science and any verification through a kind of ‘faith’ or ‘primordial opinion’.”70

The ‘deeper function’ effecting this movement of active transcendence is what Merleau-Ponty

called the “function of ‘projection’,” which he described as

the power of delineating boundaries and directions in the given world, of establish-

ing lines of force, of managing perspectives, in short, of organizing the given world

according to the projects of the moment, of building upon the geographical envi-

ronment a milieu of behavior, a system of significations that express outwardly the

internal activity of the subject.71

This is fundamentally a matter of Gestaltung. In human existence, at least in ‘normal’ cases, one’s

projects “polarize the world,” they give it a basic orientation or directionality, “and as if by magic

cause to appear there myriad signs that guide action, the way placards in a museum guide the visi-

tor.”72 In other words, “the subject’s intentions are immediately reflected in the perceptual field,

they polarize it, put their stamp on it, and effortlessly engender a wave of significations in it.”73 In

ing the role of productive imagination in perception suggests to the contrary that these aspects of bodily inten-tionality can be distinguished, and that the difference with reflective intentionality, if there is one, lies elsewhere.

70 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 395, italics added). 71 Ibid., p. 130. 72 Ibid. Merleau-Ponty underlined his “as if by magic” comment by saying that this projective function could also

be conceived in terms of evocation “in the sense in which the medium evokes something absent and makes it ap-pear.”

73 Ibid., p. 153.


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this way, ‘projection’ is the key facet of “human productivity” as this bears upon the relative “plas-

ticity” of the perceptual field—viz., the fact that there is stability but that we are not locked in cate-

gorically, that we can make sense of experience in its dynamic and often unpredictable unfolding,

and can do so in different ways.74

As an existential reinterpretation of the ‘hidden art’ of the Kantian productive imagination,75

projection lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intentional life. The perceptual syn-

theses effected according to projected styles are open and contingent, and as such provide the basis

for knowledge and intellection in general. Merleau-Ponty stressed that the latter are not reducible to

perception so construed. But he did hold that there is an “organic bond” between them in the sense

that “all our experience, all our knowledge, involves the same fundamental structures” that are

found in perceptual experience.76

The projection of style occurs originally in the perception of lived embodiment. Although Merleau-

Ponty held (see above) that “external perception and the perception of the body itself […] are the

two sides of a single act,”77 in terms of the perception of style priority accrues to the body—as noted

earlier, it is on this basis that we ‘relearn’ to see the world. Consider how he described the synthesis

of the body: “the body itself [le corps propre] teaches us a mode of unity which is not a matter of

subsumption under a law.”78 The apparent conflation witnessed above with ‘mon corps’ or ‘mon

corps lui-même’ can be resolved by recognizing that the style of ‘le corps propre’ stems from the

74 Ibid, pp. 130, 153. Cf. Smyth (2013, pp. 93-98) for a fuller discussion of ‘human productivity’. 75 See Matherne (2014) for a discussion of Cassirer’s role in this. 76 Merleau-Ponty (1996, pp. 58, 56). I shall return to this below. 77 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 237). 78 Ibid., p. 175. “It is a knot [noeud] of living significations, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms”

(ibid., p. 177).


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imagination—hence Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “our body is not to be compared to a physical ob-

ject, but rather to a work of art,”79 i.e., an expressive totality.

Yet the crucial question remains: how did Merleau-Ponty arrive at this view? The most im-

portant grounds for Merleau-Ponty’s claims about projection were pathological case studies, in par-

ticular that of ‘Schn.’, the most well-known case published by Goldstein and his collaborator

Adhémar Gelb.80 As we saw above, this and comparable cases were taken as revealing a diminished

ability to engage in the ‘abstract attitude’—that is, a diminished capacity for creative Gestaltung.

Merleau-Ponty followed this account by interpreting the case of Schn. in terms of a diminished ca-

pacity for projection, and by drawing appropriate inferences vis-à-vis ‘normal’ existence.81

Of course, cases like Schn. did not reveal this directly—as discussed above, Goldstein’s basic

epistemological claim was that the empirical facts of such cases could only be rendered intelligible

as expressions of an organismic Urbild apprehended through an act of Schau. This is the pivotal

point: for Goldstein, sound conclusions bearing upon ‘normal’ existence can be drawn on the basis

of pathological cases only if the latter are taken as definite intelligible modifications of ‘normal’ ex-

istence, such that pathological phenomena appear as “expressions of a change in the total personali-

ty of the patient.”82 It must be assumed, in other words, that the existence of the affected individuals

remains organismic in the sense of being a psychosomatically integral self-realizing Gestalt. While

the precise nature of this Gestalt remains subject to empirical study, that the existence in question is

an organismic Gestalt is, within the terms of his research, an indefeasible methodological posit.

79 Ibid., p. 176. 80 See in particular Goldstein and Gelb (1918); Goldstein (1940; 1995). But cf. Jung (1949); Bay et al (1949);

Goldenberg (2003); Marrotta and Behrmann (2004). 81 I must reserve for another occasion a critical discussion of recent accounts of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of

Schn. (e.g., Jensen 2009; Mooney 2011). 82 Goldstein (1940, p. 35-38).


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Moreover, this is an inherently normative presupposition that reflects considerable therapeutic opti-

mism on the part of Goldstein. But as we saw, he could account for it by showing that the activity of

Schau is fully general across human existence and that its scientific deployment is seamlessly con-

tinuous with that. This obviates the meta-level problem of trying to justify a separate and distinct

biological method. It also implies, however, that as with life in general science itself necessarily in-

volves “risk-taking and courage,”83 that its results are always incomplete, and that they are ultimate-

ly to be judged in terms of the practical normativity of human self-realization.

None of this is essentially different in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Schn. In particular, his

view of the empirical facts of the case pivots on the same normative methodological presupposition

that even in pathological cases human existence remains an organismic Gestalt—consider his claim,

for instance, that “there is not a single movement in a living body that is completely accidental

with regard to psychic intentions, nor a single psychic act that has not found at least its germ or its

general outline in physiological dispositions.”84 This is not (not could be) a conclusion reached

through inductive reasoning based on empirical facts, but, as in Goldstein, a provisionally indefea-

sible assumption that guides his consideration of the relevance and meaning of those facts—a con-

tingently a priori eidetic intuition of organismic style stemming from the activity of projection. The

latter thus plays the same role as Schau in Goldstein’s account of biological science.

Instructive here are comments that Merleau-Ponty made concerning Goldstein’s concept of be-

havioral ‘lability’. Noting that labile behavior inherently embraces contrary phenomena, such that

cognition of it could not possibly issue from inductive reasoning, Merleau-Ponty described it as be-

83 Goldstein (1967, p. 153). 84 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 104).


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ing “constructed” in a way that is “very close to Husserl’s Wesenschau.”85 Very close, that is, to

Merleau-Ponty’s existential reinterpretation of the latter. With Goldstein clearly in mind, Merleau-

Ponty endorsed Husserl’s claim that “the intuition of essences does not involve any more difficulties

or ‘mystical’ secrets than perception,” and that it does not pertain to phenomenology in a proprietary

way. Rather, as an imaginative practice providing ideational means for clarifying and hence under-

standing facticity it is ubiquitous across human existence, “even in a life that conforms most closely

to the natural attitude.”86 But Merleau-Ponty also tweaked the Husserlian idea of Wesenschau by

interpreting it more specifically as a capacity for Gestaltung. It was by construing essence emergent-

ly as the “intelligible structure” of experienced facts that Merleau-Ponty could claim, “pushing Hus-

serl further then he wished to go himself,” that “knowledge of essences is altogether experiential,

that it does not involve any kind of supersensible faculty, and that in the last analysis the essence is

just as contingent as the fact.”87 He could thus achieve what he took Husserl to have been implicitly

pursuing, to wit, a philosophical reform of naturalism that would effect a rapprochement of the em-

pirical and the eidetic by hewing a viable path between inductive and deductive reasoning.88 What

Merleau-Ponty called the “eidetic method” in phenomenology does just that. Based on his existen-

tial conception of its contingent apriority, the intuition of essence becomes the perception of style,

which, as discussed above, involves an imaginative projection that is responsive but not naïvely be-

holden to empirical facts.89 It was in this way that he could claim a “fundamental homogeneity” be-

tween inductive and eidetic methods, in that the respective emphases of these approaches on the real

85 Merleau-Ponty (1967, p. 72). 86 Merleau-Ponty (1964, pp. 53-54, 72; cf. 1945, pp. ix-x). 87 Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 72). 88 Ibid., pp. 53-55. 89 Cf. Meacham (2010).


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and the possible simply reflect “different degrees of naïveté or explicitness.”90 Eidetic apriority is no

less concerned with the empirical—“it is human reality which now emerges as the locus of the We-

senschau.”91 This view of phenomenology is entirely congruent with Goldstein’s conception of bio-

logical knowledge. Indeed, it is evident that Goldsteinian Schau and Husserlian Wesenschau coin-

cide in Merleau-Ponty’s account of projection as the “deeper life of consciousness beneath ‘percep-

tion’”92—that Goldstein’s scientific praxis provided a compelling model for Merleau-Ponty’s exis-

tential reinterpretation of eidetic intuition in phenomenology, and more generally for his view of

transcendental philosophy as not being “separate” from the reality with which it is concerned.93

We can now answer the primacy question. For Merleau-Ponty, the projective function is an organ-

ismic capacity for imaginative Gestaltung which, as a kind of operative-intentional praxis, is the site

of productivity in life in general and in phenomenology in particular, including the performance of

the reduction as a radical Umgestaltung of perceptual experience. Specifically, it is what stands be-

hind consideration of cases like Schn. as organismic Gestalten. As with Goldstein, the methodologi-

cal basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment is a self-referential extension of its

theme. Primacy here thus does not pertain to facts or apriority, not to corporeality or reflection, but

to the projective praxis of organismic Gestaltung that binds them concretely.

This praxis is not, however, normatively neutral. A plurality of perceptual Gestalten are always

possible—empirical facts never pick one out uniquely. As in Goldstein’s biology, Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenological approach to embodied existence is anchored on a metaphilosophical commitment

90 Merleau-Ponty (1964, pp. 72-73; see also 1948, p. 171; 1996, p. 66). 91 Ibid., p. 73, emphasis altered. 92 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 327). 93 Merleau-Ponty repeatedly affirmed that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy”

(ibid., p. 520, italics added; see also 1948, pp. 136, 235).


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that implies ‘risk-taking and courage’ inasmuch as the results of the project are ultimately to be

judged practically in terms of the normativity implied by that commitment. This was simpler for

Goldstein, for he could be forthright about his therapeutic aims. Something analogous is present in

Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, albeit at a much broader socio-political level that can-

not be explored here—the ‘human problem’ referred to earlier. Still, inasmuch as it ultimately rests

upon the experience of lived embodiment, it points back to a normative view of individual self-

realization, and how phenomenology itself can be an expression of this. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “I

am a psychological and historical structure. With existence I received a manner of existing, a style.

All my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely

a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is.”94 The aim is to learn to see the

world not just anew but also better, because truer to unbiased experience, and this rests upon the

application of this approach to oneself. “It is in becoming conscious of myself as I am that I am able

to see essences,”95 for this is the condition under which the distinction between the real and possible

dissolves. It remains the case, though, that the ‘unbiased’ experience substantiating this self-

apprehension is framed by a metaphilosophical commitment to organismic normativity.

5. Concluding Remarks

To wrap up, I’ll briefly discuss the relation between science and philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s ac-

count of human embodiment in the light of this answer to the primacy question.

First, it should be clearly affirmed that Merleau-Ponty held a positive view of natural science,

but that he also recognized that it was in a state of crisis inasmuch as it remained based on atomistic

94 Merleau-Ponty (1945, p. 519, italics added). 95 Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 73, italics added).


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and mechanistic assumptions. Along with Husserl and Goldstein (although they approached it from

opposite sides), he thus held that science was in need of philosophical reform. But Merleau-Ponty

thought the converse was also true.96 His aim was never to assert the priority of one side over the

other, but rather to identify a common basis in order to reintegrate philosophy and science.97 This is

especially salient with regard to the study of human existence, and here it was Goldstein who

showed the way. Goldstein’s holistic conception of biology “grew out the need to find some way of

making the sciences, whose methodological ways he had learned to respect, do justice to the richer

vision of human beings and human motivation found in literature and philosophy.”98 Hence the turn

to holism. Crucial here is that this was done from within natural science. Unlike most holistic oppo-

nents of mechanistic science, Goldstein did not maintain that the latter had any essential connection

with science per se, but rather represented a profound distortion of it. Goldstein’s opposition to

standard forms of naturalism was thus rooted in a deeper commitment to empirical scientific ration-

ality. In his view, “holists do not have to reject scientific research programs such as neurology and

they do not have to fear their empirical results. They just have to understand them in the right way.

[…] The alternative to mechanistic science is not irrationalism but a rational holism based on the

results of modern neurology.”99 On this basis, Goldstein’s approach mounted a robust challenge to

dualism which, although currently marginalized, is still considered scientifically relevant.100

96 This is clear enough from his work, but it was also a major part of the contemporary French context, which was marked by a sharp separation between science and philosophy along the lines of Cartesian dualism.

97 Alluding back to The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty claimed that “our goal was to understand the rela-tions between consciousness and nature […] to connect the idealist perspective, according to which nothing ex-ists except as an object for consciousness, and the realist perspective, according to which consciousnesses are in-serted into the tissue of the objective world and events in themselves” (1945, p. 490).

98 Harrington (1996, p. 142). 99 Ludwig (2012, p. 52, italics in original). 100 See Frisch (2014); Whitehead (2015, in press).


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With regard to the relation between science and philosophy, Merleau-Ponty’s account of em-

bodiment is methodologically congruent with this approach in terms of framing empirical research

within the eidetic apriority of the organismic Gestalt. Like Goldstein, he regarded isolated empirical

facts as problematically ambiguous. And he likewise did not grant epistemic priority to the eidetic

side. Rather, following Goldstein, he posited a dialectical reciprocity between it and the empirical,

such that the locus of epistemic priority alternates during the course of investigation. This need not

imply a rejection of naturalism. Contemporary questions as to whether Merleau-Ponty’s phenome-

nology of embodiment is compatible with philosophical naturalism are poorly posed. For there are

many different conceptions of naturalism,101 and in view of Goldstein’s work it is not difficult to

show that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology exhibits a certain kind of naturalism. The real question

is whether this naturalism is compatible with that which predominates within contemporary science.

I can’t get into this here. But based on the above discussion, it would be reasonable to expect in-

compatibility—not due to eidetic apriority (which is, after all, contingent), but because Merleau-

Ponty’s project is methodologically committed to viewing human corporeality as an integral exis-

tential Gestalt, an expressive totality comparable as such to a work of art. This is not anti-naturalistic

per se, but metaphilosophically it diverges significantly from standard views.

Indeed, far from being opposed to natural science, it may be argued plausibly that Merleau-

Ponty’s existential phenomenology involves an empirically more rigorous kind of naturalism than

standard views. Consider again Merleau-Ponty’s claim that empirical induction and eidetic intuition

or metaphysical reflection operate in concert, that there is a “fundamental homogeneity” between

their methods such that “there are not two kinds of knowledge, but two different degrees of explicit-

101 See, for example, Flanagan (2006).


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ness of the same knowledge,”102 “one single knowledge at different degrees of naïveté or explicit-

ness.”103 The idea of induction and intuition interrelating dialectically and on this basis forming “un

seul savoir” has to do primarily with how, and how well, discrete empirical data are brought into

synthetic relation with one another. For Merleau-Ponty, empirical science, while certainly not reduc-

ible to pre-scientific perceptual experience, should nevertheless be an expression of the encounter

with and hold on the world that occurs there.104 The robustness and purchase of natural science in

terms of its empirical and explanatory adequacy are prefigured in perception in the sense that the

relevant criteria are implicit in originary perceptual synthesis. The contribution to knowledge that

“the constructive and inductive strategies of natural science” can provide is scientifically sound and

legitimate only on condition that they are structurally continuous with the intentionalities that origi-

nally generate the phenomena that stand as the explananda of that science.105

This returns us to the theme of methodological self-reference, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s

claim that eidetic intuition works through the same function of projective Gestaltung as is originally

operative in perceptual synthesis. The point is this: even if it is the projection of the organismic Ge-

stalt as the eidetic frame for empirical research on human embodiment that renders Merleau-Ponty’s

approach incompatible with standard forms of naturalism, it may be precisely in virtue of its conti-

nuity with the intentional structure of perceptual synthesis that his view of the relation between sci-

ence and philosophy could support a conception of naturalism with stronger empirical credentials

and greater methodological coherence.

102 Merleau-Ponty (1996, p. 66). 103 Merleau-Ponty (1948, p. 171, italics added; see also 1964, pp. 72-73). 104 See Compton (1992, p. 191). 105 Ibid., p. 193.


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This all rests, however, on the primacy of projection. Science and philosophy can be allied dia-

lectically only because Merleau-Ponty identifies that function as an existentially primordial tertium

quid that sets the criterial terms for their relation, and more generally for what would count as a bet-

ter conception of naturalism. These terms are ultimately neither scientific nor philosophical as such,

but practical and normative. The mutual reform of science and philosophy that Merleau-Ponty envi-

sioned was one that would make them participatory in a deeper movement of existential self-

realization, to the normativity of which the primacy of projection implies metaphilosophical com-

mitment. Concomitant therefore to the conceivably stronger naturalism that is intimated in Merleau-

Ponty’s account of embodiment is the massive contingency of its apriority, the non-arbitrariness of

which can only be maintained on normative grounds—responsibility must be taken for how one

perceives and makes sense of empirical facts. As noted above, this was relatively straightforward for

Goldstein, who could appeal to the apparent self-evidence of therapeutic success. How does Mer-

leau-Ponty justify the projection of the organismic Gestalt? Looking forward, the answer to this

question will relate this perceptual Gestaltung of embodied existence to its broader historical hori-

zons in terms of the resolution of ‘the human problem’. Although this would expand the critical

scope of the naturalism implied in his existential-phenomenological approach, it would also distance

it further from standard views of embodiment. This distance ultimately bespeaks not theoretical but

metaphilosophical disagreement, however, and should be addressed accordingly.106

106 Acknowledgements ...


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The Primacy Question in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology

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