Merleau-Ponty desde el materialismo fenomenológico

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty thought that philosophy should assume a much more modest and less imposing form than had been customary throughout its history. He called this non-philosophy, and believed that phenomenology, with its inversion between Being and Phenomenon, responded to this demand. What matters in a philosopher, therefore, is not so much what has been said as the unthought that constitutes the substratum of our reflection. The history of philosophy did not interest him. Nor does it interest us; and for that reason we deal with him from the standpoint of what his thought has become: phenomenology as it is practised today, whatever name it may be given. Merleau-Ponty thought in the wake of his reading of Husserl, and we practise phenomenology in the wake of our reading of Merleau-Ponty.

His reception of Husserl is a reaction against the idealist Husserl and, more generally, against the attempt to set up the reduction upon subjectivity. If the correlation that structures perception consists of apprehension–adumbrations–object, we may consider that, in the reduction, this three-membered correlation is preserved, with the corresponding “coherent deformation”, so that, in the final register of the Invisible, we encounter the correlation: c/ia/r–qu¡asmo–Wesen. There are, then, three vertical dimensions in the resulting matrix, such that the first and the third are the channels along which Husserl’s transcendental reduction and eidetic reduction run, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is an effort precisely to seek the complement and to set up the reduction upon the central axis: the axis of phenomena as such, the Erscheinungenor paired phenomena, which is also the hyletic axis. Hence his interest in Nature.