Two of the most important words in the Phenomenology of Perception of Merleau-Ponty are “world” (monde) and “meaning” (sens).  This post will not focus on the long analyses that this author offers on each term but rather on the way he understands the relationship between these two terms. In his thought world and meaning are co-relative, almost synonymous: there is no world without meaning and no meaning without the world.             In common usage the term “world” is employed to talk about quite a range of different realities: the planet Earth, the ensemble of all that is, a sector of culture (the world of cinema) and so on. In general, the term has a spatial connotation, that is to say the world is a space in which something is located or in which something happens.  Merleau-Ponty speaks of the naïve conception of the world as being like a big box in which are to be found objects, people, villages, clouds… Understood in this way the world is thought of as something objective, concrete and real. It is a ready-made world, a fait accompli.             From the beginning, phenomenology strongly contested this way of thinking about the world. The main problem…

            In a central public square in Louvain, Belgium, there is an unusual work of art which consists of an enormous needle, on the point of which is impaled an insect. This figure was produced by Jan Fabre in 2004 to mark 575 years of the KU Leuven University Libraries. Our guide explained that the artist wished to bring out the limitations of modern science. By pinning down an insect, a scientist has the possibility of analysing it in all kinds of ways, some of which may indeed be of service to modern science and culture in general. Through investigation the scientist acquires forms of knowledge about the insect which can then be applied in different spheres of life. What the artist wished to dramatically denounce are the many forms of knowledge that are lost when we take this approach to insects, to any given reality or indeed to reality as a whole. What is lost? The life of the insect! Not primarily in the sense that the insect is killed but in the sense that the scientist using this method loses all access to the flashing, buzzing, flying insect and to the human experience of observing such a living…

«…language , in one who talks, does not translate a mature thought but rather accomplishes it». Maurice Merleau-Ponty             It is well known that for a good part of the 20th century language was a key theme in what is often called “analytical philosophy”, as perhaps best symbolized in the figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Less well known is the fact that language is often a key theme in what is known as “continental philosophy”, particularly in existentialism and phenomenology. This division has by now been somewhat overcome: a contemporary philosopher such as Claude Romano is extremely attentive to both these traditions (see particularly, Au cœur de la raison, la phénoménologie).             The purpose of this brief contribution is to comment on just one aspect of the theme of language in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The aspect in question concerns the relationship between thinking and talking/writing. In everyday spontaneous conversation and discussion we tend to speak of thinking and talking as two separate, consecutive activities. While preparing a lecture, for instance, I may understand myself as first walking around the garden thinking and then going to my office and writing down what I have been thinking. Merleau-Ponty strongly denounces this…

            Aristotle tells us that one way of understanding a given term is to understand its opposite. What is the opposite of “other”? A dictionary might indicate “same”. In phenomenology, this seemingly banal distinction has taken on momentous proportions, mostly thanks to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).             A key theme in the thought of Levinas is our radical incapacity to make space for the other, for what is not the same as us. He strongly denounces this chronic tendency to totalize the self. The totalitarianism of the Nazis, for instance, (which he encountered indirectly through the killing of some members of his family) is for him but the ultimate outward expression of a much more banal form of totalitarianism that dominates human life.             Let us take a simple example. Two women are in the cancer ward of a hospital: Jean: How are you today, love? Ann: Not too well. My left arm is really painful. It feels as if it is burning. Jean: I know all about that. You have no idea how sore my foot was last night… What is depicted on a nano scale in this scene occurs daily, hourly, on a micro, meso and…

            The limited purpose of this brief blog is to explain a major ambiguity in common understandings of the term “phenomenology”. It is not uncommon to read such phrases as “A phenomenology of globalization” or “The phenomenon of racism” or again “A phenomenological approach to inflation”. In such phrases, phenomenology is taken to be almost a synonym of description and indeed the texts that follow are usually just that, a mere description of the specific reality under study. There is nothing in the grammar and semantics of the English language that prohibits such an understanding of “phenomenology” and its variants. Given, however, that “phenomenology” is the name of a still relatively new and very revolutionary branch of philosophy, the least that can be said is that to understand phenomenology as the mere description of realities, in the manner of an artist or a would-be “neutral observer”, risks creating confusion.             This ambiguity, and consequent confusion, is at least partly to be explained by the fact that phenomenology, as a branch of philosophy, does indeed involve description. The form of description practised in phenomenology is the description not of the given reality in itself but of the human experience of this…