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Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of...
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Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Philosophy and Classics in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 October 2021) | Viewed by 13089

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Glen A. Mazis

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Humanities, Penn State Harrisburg, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Interests: continental philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc.); Phenomenology; philosophy of literature and poetry; environmental philosophy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The developing ontology of Merleau-Ponty, which culminates in his articulation of the “flesh of the world” (commentators agree this is implicit in his early works) places humans in “a participation in and kinship with the visible, [such that] the vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively … there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other … two vortexes … the one slightly decentered with respect to the other” (as stated on page 138 of The Visible and the Invisible). This ontology means human beings can only be described through their opening to the world as enriched by an ever new sense. Rather than being a self-subsistent mind, human beings are fundamentally shaped in community with the things of the world, other people, cultures, times, creatures, and the natural world that the traditional idea of a human being as a surveying rational mind does not. How does this alter the expression of philosophy in relation to literature? If philosophical description must express the pre-reflective, felt, imaginal, and historical dimension of situated beings, how does this make philosophy dependent upon literature and render literature philosophical in new ways? If the reversibility of the flesh means our expression is an indirect expression of the “voices of silence” (Malraux’s phrase borrowed by Merleau-Ponty) of the gesturing world, how does this make metaphor central to both endeavors and transform the idea of metaphor itself? Lastly, how is the “vertical grasp” of sense, as Merleau-Ponty calls it in a working note, change the idea of the relationship of perception, imagination, and expression?

Dr. Glen A. Mazis
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • flesh
  • perceptual depths
  • indirect expression
  • reversibility
  • processual temporality
  • perceptual imaginal
  • metaphor
  • co-naissance
  • truth as manifestation
  • co-expression
  • imagination as ontology

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 262 KiB  
Article
Animal Phenomenology: Metonymy and Sardonic Humanism in Kafka and Merleau-Ponty
by Don Beith
Humanities 2023, 12(1), 18; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h12010018 - 03 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1586
Abstract
Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from Franz Kafka’s metonymic animal literature to develop his concepts of institution and “sardonic humanism.” Metonymy is a literary device, an instituting dimension of language, that allows us a lateral access to animality and expression. Kafka’s dog story enacts [...] Read more.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes inspiration from Franz Kafka’s metonymic animal literature to develop his concepts of institution and “sardonic humanism.” Metonymy is a literary device, an instituting dimension of language, that allows us a lateral access to animality and expression. Kafka’s dog story enacts a radical reflection, a critical phenomenology parodying human life. Kafka puts forward a philosophy of generative openness to the animal, against social alienation. This reading comes with Merleau-Ponty’s existential redeployment of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious as expressive passivity or institution of adulthood. As instituting–instituted, we are always between preserving and surpassing the past, though different comportments and institutions can dogmatically or openly take up these possibilities. Kafka’s (struggle through) metonymic animal literature reminds us that philosophical truth is expressive, that unconscious desire animates language, and that the oppressive silencing of the generative past, the feeling child and the other animal, is at the root of society’s institutionalized oppression. Institution offers a literary method of phenomenologically resisting, of creative critique. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?)
8 pages, 245 KiB  
Article
Questioning Cézanne across Sightlines: Balzac, Zola, and Merleau-Ponty
by Véronique M. Fóti
Humanities 2022, 11(2), 56; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h11020056 - 14 Apr 2022
Viewed by 1868
Abstract
Although Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of Cézanne in the context of his philosophy of painting does not explicitly address the painter’s relation to literature, this relation is important and somewhat problematic. Cézanne was an avid reader of both classical Latin and contemporary French literature, but [...] Read more.
Although Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of Cézanne in the context of his philosophy of painting does not explicitly address the painter’s relation to literature, this relation is important and somewhat problematic. Cézanne was an avid reader of both classical Latin and contemporary French literature, but he sought, in his maturity, to dissociate painting from the inspiration of literature. The danger of a mode of figurative painting informed by literature is explored in Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece, of which there are echoes in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of painting, and which is alluded to in Emile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece, which led Cézanne to break off his lifelong friendship with the author. Zola’s novel contradicts Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the artist’s creative freedom by portraying his protagonist, modeled on Cézanne, as destroyed by a fatality of destiny. Cézanne, in his maturity, sought to conjoin in painting a “logic of the eyes” with a “logic of the brain” resulting in an art genuinely “parallel with nature”, which it sought to express rather than to represent. The article explores this dissociation of painting from literature and autonomy with respect to what Merleau-Ponty calls “the dimension of color” and to Cézanne’s lifelong theme of bathers in a landscape. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?)
12 pages, 256 KiB  
Article
Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Ontology and Literature: Gesture, Metaphor, Flesh, and Sensible Ideas
by Glen A. Mazis
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 26; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h11010026 - 11 Feb 2022
Viewed by 2844
Abstract
This essay traces out the importance of the poetic and creative use of language to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. Why Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment inevitably had to turn towards a poetic use of language and to see the overlap between literature and philosophy in articulating [...] Read more.
This essay traces out the importance of the poetic and creative use of language to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. Why Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment inevitably had to turn towards a poetic use of language and to see the overlap between literature and philosophy in articulating an ontology is examined. The tie between a deeper sense of metaphor and the structure of the flesh of the world is explored. The attempt to articulate the latent background of perception leads to the essential role of what will be called the “physiognomic imagination”, which is a different use of imagination than “make-believe” and is key to the unfolding of the depths of perceptual sense. Understanding the efficacy of the literary use of language to the manifestation of further sense also requires an understanding of the temporality of the institution and the ongoing becoming of the real in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s turn to poetic language was both a source of his insights for ontology and the way that he came to express his own philosophy as a necessary outcome of fidelity to the phenomenology of perception. Given the parallel structure of the flesh of the world and metaphor, the dialogical nature of the perceptual encounter with the “voice of silence”, and the increasing importance of physiognomic imaginations, the temporality of institution and “sensible ideas” to his indirect ontology, the literary and poetic use of language had to assume a central role in the articulation of the flesh ontology as well as to the further manifestation of sense. This assertion is meant to rectify the reading and commentaries that fail to see this necessity and instead interpret Merleau-Ponty’s increasing use of poetic language as merely a residue of his evolving writing style and not as the necessary outcome of his ontological insights. This essay is also meant to address phenomenologists who fail to turn to literature and the poetic expression of embodied ontology as failing to carry forth Merleau-Ponty’s revisioning of philosophy and centrality of perception and embodiment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?)
11 pages, 286 KiB  
Article
Happy Existentialist Metaphors: Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World and the Chandos Complex
by Annabelle Dufourcq
Humanities 2022, 11(1), 17; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h11010017 - 14 Jan 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2585
Abstract
This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key [...] Read more.
This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?)
12 pages, 251 KiB  
Article
Literature, Ontology, and Implex in Merleau-Ponty: Writing and Finding the Concrete Limit of Phenomena
by Rajiv Kaushik
Humanities 2021, 10(4), 118; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/h10040118 - 10 Nov 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2250
Abstract
This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between the literary uses of language in Merleau-Ponty’s own work and his ontology. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of phenomenology—that is, his critique of an already critical philosophy—leads him to say that the limits of phenomena [...] Read more.
This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between the literary uses of language in Merleau-Ponty’s own work and his ontology. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of phenomenology—that is, his critique of an already critical philosophy—leads him to say that the limits of phenomena are inside the entire structure of the phenomena. They are, in other words, promiscuous or dehiscent and therefore are not limits that can themselves be given. Merleau-Ponty would say that such limits are silent or mute within meaning. This will have repercussions for the very method of phenomenology. It can no longer be a descriptive method, concerned with the givenness of the phenomena, but needs to be matrixed with an expressive method that shows up the impossibility of such a return. This expressive method has to do with what he calls the “implex”—the very bodily limit of the inside and the outside that cannot be thought as one or the other, or even their synthesis. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology invites us towards a concrete bodily limit that is, at the same time, a limit to philosophy. In effect, one cannot think of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh apart from language, because this ontology, its very concrete crystallization, requires expression and not just description. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Merleau-Ponty and Literature: In What Ways Does the Ontology of “the Flesh of the World” Marry Philosophy and Literature?)
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