"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Merleau-Ponty + traditional epistemology
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November 5, 2009
I've dug into the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty earlier over at conversations, where I'd briefly explored the Introduction. In the first chapter Charles Taylor argues that Merleau Ponty helped us to break out of classical or representational epistemology's picture of our grasp of the world\that heldus captive. He says:
There are many versions of this theory, but the central idea in this picture, as we have seen, is that all our understanding of the world is ultimately mediated knowledge. That is, it is knowledge that comes through something “inner,” within ourselves or produced by the mind. This means we can understand our grasp of theworld as something that is, in principle, separable from what it is a grasp of.
Taylor adds that:
This separation was obviously central to the original Cartesian thrust that we are all trying to turn back and deconstruct. On one side, there were the bits of putative information in the mind – ideas, impressions, sense data. On the other, there was the “outside world” of which these claimed to inform us. The dualism can later take other, more sophisticated forms. As I said earlier, representations will later be reconceived no longer as “ideas,” but as sentences, in keeping with the linguistic turn, as we see with Quine. Or the dualism itself can be fundamentally reconceptualized, as with Kant. nstead of being defined in terms of original and copy, it is seen on the model of form and content, mold and filling. In whatever form, mediational theories posit something that can be defined as inner, as our contribution to knowing and which can be distinguished fromwhat is out there.
He does this by drawing on drawing on Heidegger, as well as Merleau- Ponty. for what we find in both is the idea that our conceptual thinking is “embedded”in everyday coping. The point of this image can be taken in two bites, as it were. The first is that coping is prior and pervasive:
We start off as coping infants and only later are inducted into speech. Even as adults, much of our lives consists in this coping.Even as adults,much of our lives consists in this coping. This couldn’t be otherwise. To focus on something,we have to keep going – as I was on the path, while thinking of the difficult conversation; or as the person is in the laboratory,walking around, picking up the report, while thinking hard about the theoretical issues (or maybe about what’s for lunch).
The second bite goes deeper. It’s the point usually expressed with the term “background.”
All exercises of reflective, conceptual thought only have the content they have situated in a context of background understanding that underlies and is generated in everyday coping. we are only able to form conceptual beliefs guided by oursurroundings because we live in a preconceptual engagement with these surroundings, which involves understanding.
So our grasp of things is not something that is in us, over against the world; it lies in the way we are in contact with the world. Hence the view of the agent as being-in-the-world.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:22 AM | Permalink |
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