Merleau-Ponty's reading of Descartes : from Cartesian duality to the new ontological structure

Abstract

The duality between the mind and the body has been haunting a wide field of academic discussions since René Descartes’ (1596–1650) philosophy. The problem not only concerns the inexplicable relation between immaterial and material substances, but also the relation between reflective thought and the unreflected experience: there are two fields of evidence which both have their own types of clarity, but which remain obscure for each other. The lived and practical experience is opposed to the objective knowledge of the sciences. Cartesian philosophy is established on the refusal of the non-philosophical life, which, nevertheless, it cannot refuse. This work offers an investigation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908–1961) interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy. Merleau-Ponty comments on Descartes’ ideas throughout his work. The most central problem for him is the relation between mind and body: Descartes demonstrates both the distinction and the union between them. In his early work Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues that Descartes’ philosophy consists of a contradiction between the distinct pure mind and the lived experience of the union. He reformulates this contradiction as the paradox of reflection: reflection reflects on the unreflected experience which nevertheless withdraws from reflection. In his later and unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty continues to elaborate the paradoxical relation of connection and difference as the new ontological structure. He designates the new ontological structure as a solution to the problem of the duality of Cartesian ontology: it is the differentiation of the sensible texture, the thickness of time, and the depth of history. The work consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a systematic study of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Descartes in Phenomenology of Perception, and it explicates Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the contradiction in Descartes’ philosophy. Chapter Two investigates the historical background of Merleau-Ponty’s work by studying the Cartesian tradition after Descartes. Chapter Three shows how Merleau-Ponty approaches the duality of Cartesian ontology, and how he begins his discussion on the new ontology in relation to it. Chapter Four is a systematic investigation of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology in The Visible and the Invisible, and it demonstrates how he answers the problem of Cartesian duality with his new ontological structure. Chapter Five adds perspectives from Merleau-Ponty’s later lectures on Descartes, and, at the end, studies Merleau-Ponty’s concept of freedom in relation to his idea of the ontological structure of connection and difference.