Discussion

A Path of Understanding for Psychology1 Donald E. Polkinghorne University of Southern California Abstract The path for understanding human existence developed by Merleau-Ponty is proposed as a replacement for the paths historically employed by psychology. Descartes established the agenda for modernistic philosophy when he proposed that the task of philosophy is to provide a foundation on which assurances of certain truth can be built. Modernist philosophers followed to paths in the search for a foundation—the path of sensation (empiri- cism) and the path of reason (rationalism). Post- modernists argue that Descartes' agenda was misguided and that there is no foundation for certain knowledge.

They set upon the path of language which led them to the dismissal of the human subject. Merleau-Ponty suggested a different path which is the exploration of the lived body in which thought and extension are intertwined. Along this path is located the human subject in its temporality and embodiment. The path of embodiment is held to be a more fruitful path than the path of language.

Merleau-Ponty begins his The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968) by calling attention to the "labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions" (p.

3) in which find ourselves when attempting to explain the nature of the knower, the known, and knowing. He believes that the reason for these confusions is that we have chosen the wrong point of departure in considering these questions. The point of departure we have started from is Descartes' assumption that, by standing outside of our knowing process, we can make it an object of thought; that is, to objectify our own cognitive activity through disengaging and distancing ourselves from it. This notion that the certain knowledge can be producedthrough assuming a disinterested stance has been an overriding prob- lematic for modernist philosophies of science. From this starting point, in which abstract reflection is given as the mode for interrogating the knowing process, two primary paths have been trod—empiricism and rationalism.

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This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 129 These paths are paved with different assumptions; one with ideas relating to the exterior and outside of the knowing subject and the other with ideas relating to the interior and inside of the knowing sub- ject. Travelers on both paths asserted that by coming along with them, one would arrive at a final certainty of understanding about the knowl- edge process. But neither path leads to an "abode of truth" (Merleau- Ponty, 1964/1968) in which a certain and coherent account of the knowledge process is located. Merleau-Ponty proposes that we must begin anew and select a new starting point, realizing that the path that begins there is rocky and uncertain. Along this path the view is of the body-subject and its lived experience before it is abstracted into sepa- rate parts—mind and matter, knower and known, the invisible and the visible. The path does not lead to a high hill from which all can be viewed and known; rather it leads through the hollows and open spaces. It does not end at an abode of truth, but simply goes from place to place. But by traveling along it one sees more than what had been seen before and deepens his or her understanding of self, other, and the world.

THE PATHS OF MODERNISM The starting point for the modernist search for a certain understand- ing of the knowledge process was established by Descartes. Descartes' proposed agenda for philosophy—the study of how we can have knowledge—became the fundamental concern of modernist philoso- phy. His statement of the problem also set the basic parameters in which modern and postmodern philosophers have contested solutions about how true knowledge is assured when the knower is different from and other than what is to be known. Descartes proposed that the objects to be known stimulate the sense organs, which in turn send messages along nerves to the brain (where the mind is located). All this action occurs within the extended, material realm and can be understood as a mechanical process. The model presented Descartes with two problems: (a) how the sensate impressions, which remain as aspects of the extended realm, cross over to the mind, which is without extension, and (b) how can one be sure that what is transported to the mind is an accurate representation of the stimulus object? Descartes' suggested answers to these questions—it is the vibrations of the pineal gland which allows the extended impressions to produce images in the unextended mind, and there is a benevolent God that assures the accu- racy of the mind's images of worldly objects—were inadequate.

In his understanding of knowing, Descartes accepted a representa- tional theory of perception, that is, ideas or images gained through per- ception are like little pictures of objects. Materials objects cause ideas in us; those ideas, in turn, represent the objects that cause them. After his thought experiments, in which he considered that it is possible that This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 130 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 the images were part of a dream and not representations derived from sensate experience, he changed his model of knowing. He shifted from a simple representational model to one in which the mind itself makes the most significant contribution to knowledge. He wrote, "... the principal and commonest error which we may meet with in them, con- sists in my judging that the ideas which are in me are similar or con- formable to the things which are outside me" (1641/1955, p. 160). In the Second Meditation, Descartes introduced his famous example of the lump of wax. In the example, he notes that when a piece of wax is melted, its properties—such as, its color, shape, hardness, and smell— that had appeared in perception to be part of its essence are, in fact, merely accidental properties. It is the mind itself that abstracts from the ideas presented to it by perception what is constant and unchang- ing about material objects. It is the mind, through rational reflection, that produces necessary and universal truths.

These two approaches to knowing—representation through the senses and knowledge of essences through reason—are the precursors of the prevailing modernist philosophies of empiricism and rational- ism. Descartes also posed the idea of "first-person privilege," which was further developed in both empiricist and rationalist philosophies. First-person privilege refers to the idea that I am able to know what I think, feel, and experience with an authority that is quite different from any authority that attaches to my knowledge of other people or things. The privileged awareness of the contents of one's own con- sciousness is transparent and provides a certain foundation for knowledge.

Both empiricism and rationalism sought to establish paths, which if followed, would lead to a certain truths about the real. In many of his texts, Merleau-Ponty explains his approach to knowledge by differenti- ating it from the traditions of empiricism and rationalism. For the sake of brevity, only the basic framework of these positions will be given.

Empiricism. In the main, the empiricist tradition has held that all concepts are derived from experience, i.e. that a linguistic expression can be significant only if it is associated by rule with something that can be experienced, and that all statements claiming to express knowl-edge depend for their justification on experience. The version of empiricism that has had the strongest impact on psychology is the logi- cal empiricism of the Vienna circle. (The Vienna circle, in its begin- nings, referred to its views as logical positivism, but because there was little affinity between their views and the traditional positivism of Comte and Saint-Simon, Carnap suggested using the term logical empiricism to avoid the association with the ideas of Comte that the word positivism conveyed (Gordon, 1993).

The logical empiricists believed that they had established the ideal epistemic principles by which certain knowledge could be gained and This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 131 by which proper science could be differentiated from pseudo-science and metaphysics. Although the members of the Vienna circle differed somewhat in their views, I will simply outline the themes presently identified with the movement, (a) The only acceptable source of fac- tual information about the world is the data we obtain through our senses, that is, observable data, (b) The concepts of science must referonly to physical things and events. Statements that do not represent observable entities are meaningless and unintelligible. And (c) scien- tific statements are either true or false and no statement can be neither true nor false (Margolis, 1987).

The standard view of psychology's relationship with logical empiri- cism was that a close alliance existed between them. For example, Boring (1950) treated behaviorism, operational psychology, and logical empiricism as aspects of a single movement; and Koch (1964) held that behaviorism imported logical positivism as its view of science. How- ever, Smith's (1986) recent analysis of Tolman, Hull, and Skinner raises questions about how close an alliance actually existed.

Shortly after it was put together, the original program of logical empiricism began to erode (Polkinghorne, 1983). Hempel advocated that science needed to do more than simply describe the world; science should also explain the world. He revised the notion that all state- ments must refer directly to observable phenomena by allowing for theoretical statements that need not refer to observable entities, as long as inferences drawn from these statements can be linked to direct observations. Popper attacked the principle of verification, by which universal statements were inferred through examination of particulars.

Popper held that this "problem of induction" undercut the idea of ver- ification and proposed that science proceeds by falsification, not verifi- cation, of hypotheses. The Duhem-Quine thesis called attention to the notion that a single falsifying observation does not necessarily falsify a hypothesis because adjustments can be made elsewhere in the support- ing set of propositions. Hanson pointed out that observations are not "theory-free" because some sort of theory is necessary to make any factual observation. These and other critiques led to a discrediting of logical empiricism as a viable philosophy of science. Passmore (1967) wrote that "logical positivism ... is dead, or as dead a philosophical movement ever becomes" (p. 56). Yet, logical empiricism has left its mark on psychology, and it still functions as an underground standard in which physics is held up as the ideal science and the research proce- dures used by physics are taken as a model for research (Margolis, 1986).

Some psychologists remain committed to logical empiricism's notion of the "unity of science," that is, that all descriptions (including psychological descriptions) can be reduced to the language of physical observations; and the language of science should be limited to exten- sional statements, that is, statements that in a form that allows for a This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 132 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 bipolar determination of their truth or falsehood. In spite of (or because of) its lingering influence, calls continue to be made for psy- chology to adopt some radically different approach as its philosophy of science (for example, (Manicas & Secord, 1983; Margolis, Manicas, Harre, & Secord, 1986).

Rationalism. While the path of empiricism has been most influential in the natural sciences and boosted by their success, the path of ration- alism has been more traveled by philosophers and, with amendments, taken by cognitive psychology. The major tenants of rationalism are that the mind is constitutionally endowed with concepts and ideas which it has not derived from experience and that there is knowledge that does not depend for its justification on experience, and yet, which is substantially informative and not merely verbal or analytic in charac- ter. The basic set of concepts inherent in the mind are the formal con- cepts of deductive logic, for example, those of negation and entailment. In addition to the rules of formal logic, the mind can rec- ognize self-evident axioms. By applying the innately held rules of for- mal logic to self-evident axioms allows one to deduce further truths that are not self-evident in themselves. The exemplar of this kind of deductive truth was Euclidean geometry, in which the properties of space are derived from self-evident axioms, for example, parallel lines, when extended, cannot cross. (In the 1800s, this "axiom" was shown not to be self-evident, but instead, it was merely one among several possible assumptions.) The format of providing axioms followed bydeductions derived logically from the axioms was a significant influ- ence on philosophers of the 1600s. For example, the format was used by Newton (although he was committed to an empirical approach to science) laid out his physical mechanics in his Principia, by Spinoza in his Ethics, and by Hobbes in his Leviathan (Gordon, 1993).

Kant, who was trained in the rationalist tradition, was "awakened" by Hume's empiricist attack on the speculations of rationalism. Hume was skeptical that we could know anything except perceptions them- selves. The belief that material objects cause our perceptions is not provable nor is the belief in causality or substance. Kant's transcen- dental idealism was developed as an alternative to traditional rational- ism and Hume's radical empiricism. Although Kant's lineage is from rationalism and idealism, he can be understood as an architect of a new path for understanding the knowledge process. His primary ideas about the knowledge we have of natural objects are presented in hisCritique of Pure Reason (1781/1965) and in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783/1950), a text he wrote for teachers of the Cri- tique. The following discussion of Kant's ideas is based on these two books.

Like both rationalists and empiricists before him, Kant accepted the distinction between judgments that are knowable a priori (knowable This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 133 without reference to experience) and those knowable a posteriori(knowable only by reference to experience. To these, he introduced another distinction, the difference between analytic judgments and synthetic judgments. Analytic propositions are those in which the predicate adds nothing to the subject of the judgment, and the denial of analytical statements is self-contradictory (an example of an analytic statement is the proverbial "all bachelors are unmarried"). Synthetic propositions are those in which the predicate adds information to the subject and the denial of a synthetic proposition is not self-contradic- tory (an example of a synthetic statement is "this room is warm"). (In the 20th century, the logical empiricists held that the analytic-synthetic distinction was crucial, but they emphasized that synthetic statements were the main depository of human knowledge. Determination of the truth of a synthetic proposition required verification by observation.) Kant's project was to establish that there were synthetic a priori judgments. His demonstration of the reality of synthetic a priori judg- ments began by examining the forms of sensing (the sensible or intui-tive faculty). Because of this faculty, we are able to recognize the appearance of an object within our experience. Mathematical under- standing, however, although a product of the intuitive faculty, was not part of the particular empirical content of an intuition. Kant proposed that mathematical understanding was a production of the form of intui- tion itself, not a representation of properties in the things intuited. For example, the experience of "five" of something is not specific to any particular intuition, but is common property of the mathematical dimension of all intuitions. He concluded that it is the mind itself that is the source of the formal conditions for something to appear as numerical. The formal mathematical features of intuition are spelled out as the temporal dimension of experience, in which things are codi- fied by the mathematics of numbers, and as the spatial dimension of experience, in which things are codified by the mathematics of geome- try. These formal features of sensing cannot be taken to reflect neces- sarily anything about the objects in themselves (noumena); rather, they are descriptions of formal features of the mind through which objects of the world present themselves to experience. Thus, the appearances in experience (phenomena) are, to a certain extent dependent on the features of the perceiver's mind. In this sense Kant is an idealist, but not in the Berkelian sense that the material world does not have exist-ence independent of our perceptions. Rather, Kant proposed a tran- scendental idealism, in which he stipulates that there are formal conditions of human mental operations that set the conditions for how things appear in experience. Kant understood his idealism to be fully compatible with, what he termed, empirical realism; that is, the mind can have knowledge of objects which are not dependent on humans for their existence.

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This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 134 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 Kant extended his approach to natural science by considering the conditions of forms of thought (the faculty of judgment) that are nec- essary for experiencing relationships among appearances. For exam- ple, "all x are y" is the form of a generic relationship that can be applied in particular judgments about a relationship that may hold between two objects appearing in consciousness. These generic rela- tionships are a priori concepts, which are antecedent to all experience and a condition of the possibility of making any specific judgments (such as "all swans are white"). The relational concepts, or categories, that the mind contributes to experience include notions of permanence (substance) and regular sequence (causality), as well as judgments(previously described by Aristotle) relating to aspects of quantity, quality, relations, and modality. The purpose of natural science is to articulate relationships that hold among the objects of experience.

What "actual" relationships (or laws) hold among and between objects of the world is the province of scientific investigation; but the possible kinds of relationships that can be understood derives from the a priori categories of thought.

The final philosopher to be discussed, among of those who pursued Descartes' agenda of establishing a certain foundation for knowledge, is Husserl. Husserl first presented his phenomenological approach in his Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology (1913/1976) on which much of this discussion is based. Husserl's thought played a cen- tral role for Merleau-Ponty in the development of his own notions of interrogating experience. Merleau-Ponty, however, made crucial changes in his adaptation of Husserl's thought, in particular, Merleau- Ponty did not pursue an absolute foundation on which certain knowl- edge could be based.

Husserl accepted Kant's distinction between the noumena and phe- nomena, that is, between things as the are in themselves and things as they appear in consciousness. But he borrowed from Brentano the notion that consciousness is a direction, not a state. Throughout most of the modernist period the understanding of the nature of mind, reflected the vestiges of Descartes' dual substance theory. In this view, the mind was understood to be like a container in which thoughts and representations of things were held. The mind was held to be closed off from direct contact with the world, thereby presenting the problems (mentioned above) as to how one could know the representations in the mind corresponded to the things of which they were supposed to be representations and how we could be certain that other minds exist? In contrast, Brentano's understanding was that to be aware of a table is not to contemplate a private, inner representation of the table, but to be directed toward, or to intend, the table. This understanding of the mind as intentional was also meant to correct Kant's notion that expe- rience is constructed by the mind's categories. Brentano's position was This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 135 that the mind, instead of constructing the objects of which it is aware, the mind simply discloses or displays the actual objects of the world.For him, the mind is not a container, but is open to and attending to the world itself.

Brentano's views appealed to both analytic philoso- phers (who are linked to the British empiricist tradition) and to Hus- serl and his phenomenological school. Brentano's idea of the mind as a direction was employed by the analytic philosophers to emphasize:

(a) a focus on he worldly objects themselves, which were available for study because of the transparency of consciousness, (b) a method for studying the complexes of world that consisted of analyzing things into their constituent parts, and (c) a way to overcome the disjunction between the world as described by physics and our everyday experi- ence of it.

Regarding this last point, although Brentano's position was that consciousness is open to the world and allows the world itself to be directly experienced. Nevertheless, what appears in consciousnessis often a distortion of the things as they are in themselves.

The ana- lysts believed that the cause of these distortions was t the inexact and confused way we use language. Thus, they proposed a therapeutic pro- gram that would allow the things of the world to appear without distor- tion in consciousness.

The program consisted of bringing such clarity to language that it will no longer distort experience.

The implications the phenomenologists found in Brentano's understanding of conscious- ness were quite different from those noted by the analysts.

The phe- nomenologists saw in Brentano's view of consciousness:

(a) a way to study consciousness itself, not a way to study the objects of the world, (b) an approach to investigate the interconnectedness of things dis- played in consciousness, not a method for uncovering parts that make them up, (c) a method that would allow for investigation of the wholeof the experiential world including emotions, values, as well as the enduring and transitory things.

In regard to the distortions in appear- ance that the things display in consciousness, the phenomenologists that these were the result of preconceptions and that the way to over- come these was to employ a method that overcame our preconceptions and allowed for things to display themselves as they are without distor- tion; thus, the phenomenologists called for a return to the things them- selves (Jones, 1969).

Husserl, like the modernist philosophers before him, accepted Descartes' agenda to achieve a rationally certain understanding of the knowing process. Husserl's method for an improved study of con- sciousness required that we bracket our natural inclination to accept the real existence of the objects that appear in consciousness.

In this bracketing we are to focus on our conscious experience of objects and turn away from interest in their actual existence.

In this turn away from concern about the actual existence of objects, it is not essential whether what is displayed in consciousness exists as part of a dream or This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 136 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 as part of the extended world. Husserl recognizes the difficulty of assuming the attitude of bracketing, but he holds that with the suspen- sion of the truth-claims that are present in our everyday cognitive processing, one finds him or herself in the presence of important truths that would otherwise escape attention. For Husserl, the truths that survive the bracketing process will have absolutely certainty. Husserl calls on Descartes' notion of first-person privilege as support for the certainty of what is experienced in one's own consciousness. The expe- rience itself, although not the surety of the experienced objects' actual existence, in indubitable.

What survives bracketing is consciousness as Brentano described it, that is, the acts of displaying and the displayed objects. Husserl's first studies focused on the study of the experiences of the intended objects (the noemata). Any particular experience of an object is always par- tial, displaying only portions of the object that are available to a partic- ular perspective. Careful attention to various experienced appearances of the object and the application of the special form of eidetic bracketing discloses the essence of the objects as it is in its wholeness. What serves to synthesize the various appearances into a consciousness of the essential whole of the object, Husserl called the transcendent ego. The phenomenological method can also attend to the various kinds of acts of displaying (the noetic acts). Studies of the various kinds of noetic acts included those of thinking, willing, doubt- ing, fearing, believing, hoping, and loving (Miller, 1984).

The purpose of this cursory survey of modernist approaches to knowing is to provide background and context for understanding the significance of Merleau-Ponty's work. Merleau-Ponty believed that neither the empiricist nor rationalist traditions provided a path along which one could comprehend the complexity and ambiguities of the knowing process. The next section describes the path Merleau-Ponty takes toward a deepened understanding of the experience of knowing.

MERLEAU-PONTY Merleau-Ponty's first publication appeared in 1942 (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963) and his last appeared posthumously in 1964 (Merleau- Ponty, 1964/1968) after his sudden death from a stroke in 1961. In the 34 years since Merleau-Ponty's death, the topics of interest that make up the philosophic conversation have turned from the dimensions of human existence to the power of language to impose meaning. The method of philosophic investigation has also changed from phenome- nological reflection on the subject's experience to a poststructuralist decentering of the subject and a concern with deconstructing texts. To understand the historical context in which Merleau-Ponty developed his ideas, it is important to note the publication dates of the books that make up the oeuvre of contemporary philosophy. Gadamer's Truth This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 137 and Method (Gadamer, 1965/1975), which stimulated the hermeneutic movement, was first published in 1960 shortly before Merleau-Ponty's death. Derrida's texts on poststructural deconstruction were not yet published. His Husserl's Origin of Geometry (1962/1989) appeared in 1962 and three of his major texts were published in 1967 (1967/1973; 1967/1975; 1967/1978). Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979/ 1984) was published in 1979, and Habermas' first major work on criti- cal theory (1969/1971) did not appear until eight years after Merleau- Ponty's death. Not only did Merleau-Ponty die before the advent of the writings of the participants in the contemporary philosophical tra- dition, but Merleau-Ponty's work is rarely referred to by these partici- pants.

Burke (1993) describes the situation: "His [Merleau-Ponty's] arguments have not factored significantly in the mainstream philo- sophic conversations of the last twenty years, [and] ... he has been skirted, ignored, [and]...

repressed" (p. xvii). For many of the current participants, Merleau-Ponty is identified with the phenomenological tradition; and they believe that this tradition, with its emphasis on the conscious subject, has been overcome by the postmodern notion that language systems have displaced the consciousness subject as the author of speech and writing.

Yet within the past several years interest in Merleau-Ponty has re- surfaced (Busch & Gallagher, 1992; Gill, 1991; Johnson, 1990). One theme that runs through these books is that Merleau-Ponty is of inter- est because he was a proto-postmodernist, having anticipated many of positions advocated by current participants in the philosophical con- versation (for example, (Madison, 1992, 1993). My interest in Merleau-Ponty differs from those who see him as a forerunner of postmodernism (in this it parallels Margolis, 1992), but that he explored a different path than the one taken by most poststructuralist and postmodern writers In the contemporary situation, philosophy, as it had been practiced since Descartes set its agenda, is understood as having come to an end (Rorty, 1979). No longer can philosophers approach their task as that of providing a rational basis for the episte- mological foundation of modern science; instead, their task has been re-conceived as the deconstruction of the assumptions on which mod- ernism was based. The path taken by these postmodern writers, in response to the "end of philosophy, has been to seek refuge in the study of language. Such study focuses on exploring the relationship between and among the sign system's components—concepts or mean- ings (the signified)and sound images or graphic equivalents (the signi- fiers)—and relationship that might hold between signs and the things to which they might refer. This path has no room for the human sub- ject as having a part in the creation of meaning, having replaced the subject with the language system. The language system itself is held tobe the source of meaning and the person merely a vehicle through This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 138 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 which the system speaks or writes (Derrida, 1967/1978). The path appears to me to lead to a dead end for psychology. The subject mat- ter of psychological inquiry is the person and his or her actions and experiences. The more moderate of those who trod the path of postmodernism only advocate that we attend to the historical and con- textual nature of all knowledge. Nevertheless, once one sets out on the path of language, it is difficult to find a place for the person as an interactive, responsible, valuing, feeling, and planning being who inhabits the world.

Merleau-Ponty began down a different path and should be under- stood as the originator of a new way of philosophizing, a "thinking from within Being" (Dastur, 1993), and not simply as one of the last major philosophers of a discredited phenomenological and existential tradition. My interest in Merleau-Ponty is that he offers a more fruitful and deeper response to the so called "end of philosophy" than the lin- guistic path taken by most of the participants in the contemporary conversation.

Like the postmodernists, Merleau-Ponty believes that traveling the path of either rationalism or empiricism in the hope of achieving a cer- tain understanding of the knowing process leads to either dogmaticassertions or to skepticism (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962). He proposes, as an alternative, a shift away from the paths of abstract intellectual analysis to one of a "concrete philosophy." This path focuses on the lived experience of human existence and consists of the examination of lived experience by means of open-ended interrogations (Merleau- Ponty, 1960/1964). Merleau-Ponty sought to defeat the Cartesian vision of certain knowledge and its legacy, the modernist attempts to establish a method that assured the production of objective truth. The strategy he employed to accomplish task was to enhance biologically the concept of body. Through this maneuver he sought to ascribe the notions of subjectivity, intentionality, mentality, and the like, directlyto the "lived body." Margolis (, 1987) comments:

Merleau-Ponty's brilliant suggestion is, of course, the bio- logical cannot be reduced to the physical; the "body" in the sense of "lived body" (le corps vecu) cannot have thesame sense it has in the expression "physical body" as used in normal physics; the Cartesian disjunction between the mental and the physical fatally equivocates and sup- presses the distinction between the physical and the bio-logical; that the psychological cannot be separated from the biological; and that, to put the point in its boldest and most provocative form, the intentional is already a feature of the bodily, (p. 88) This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 139 As Margolis points out, Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodiment is not to be confused with the notion that the body is simply an object among other objects in the world. That is, my body is not merely a passive thing responding mechanically to stimuli; rather, it is a pur- poseful activity engaging the world in its projects. The lived body pos-sesses a movement toward something, and, thus, has a vectorial thrust and momentum (1945/1962, p. 85). My body is not an organism to which the psyche is joined; rather, it is a bipolar dynamic composed of both physical and intentional dimensions. In the lived body the physi- cal is woven together with consciousness to form two aspects of a uni- fied whole.

The body is the center of human life and knowledge. My body locates me in the space and time I inhabit. It provides me with a place from which to see the surrounding world; "is not to see always to see from somewhere" (1945/1962, p. 67). But my body is mobile and as I move around what was there is now here. My body also situates me intime so that my actual present is now seen as the future of what had been my past.

Merleau-Ponty's strategy for inquiring into human experience is to stay close to our embodied experience. Philosophical reflection need not (nor should it) withdraw from the lived body towards a transcen- dent consciousness as a place from which to view experience (as Hus- serl proposed in his bracketing method). Reflection need merely "steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice" (1945/1962, p. xiii). Even in our philosophic work we are never spectators of experience, but remain within it. Thus, our reflective knowledge occurs as we are bod- ily engaged in the world. This means that we cannot attain a God's eye nor a purely spectator view of experience, but have to develop our understanding of it "on the run." The truth and reality of experience offers itself "only to someone who wishes not to have them, but to see them, not to hold them as with forceps, or to immobilize them as underthe objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness to their continued being" (1964/1968, p. 101).

By staying close to our experience, we return to "the world that pre- cedes knowledge" (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. ix). This is the world that shows through the perceptual openness of body to the world.Merleau-Ponty assigns intentionality to the lived body which, unlike Husserl's intentionality of consciousness, functions below the level of explicit consciousness. This recovery of the first-order experience of the world precedes the second-order world expressed by science. Sci- ence is an abstract and derivative sign-language removed from the eve- ryday first-order, primordial world displayed in lived experience,. Our first-order experience is like that of our first-hand knowledge of the This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 140 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 country side. Merleau-Ponty uses two examples to show the difference between a first-order lived experience and a second-order abstracted experience: (a) First order experience is knowing "what a forest, a prairie, or a river is," (1945/1962, p. ix) compared to the knowledge of geography gives of the same things; and (b) the first-order "lived" knowledge of a village's whereabouts compared to that [second-order knowledge] based on landmarks and compass readings" (1945/1962, p.

285).

When reflective interrogation is focused on lived experience, what is displayed is not mind (rationalism) as separated from body (empiri- cism); but, rather, body and mind in an intertwined unity. It is this focus on the unique embodied character of human existence that is the starting point for Merleau-Ponty. In an unpublished text quoted by Margolis (Merleau-Ponty's unpublished text, as cited in Margolis, 1989), Merleau-Ponty comments, The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind. I have tried, first of all, to re-establish the roots of the mind in thebody and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness (that is, against empiri- cism and rationalism as forms of naturalism or objectiv- ism).

These philosophies commonly forget—in favor of a pure exteriority or of a pure interiority—the insertion of the mind in corporeality, the ambiguous relation which we entertain with our body and, correlatively, with per- ceived things, (p. 72) Beginning with the notion of an incarnated mind, Merleau-Ponty explores various aspects of human experience—relations with others, expression and language, sexuality, art and literature, time, freedom, and history. Following will be a brief discussion of his views on only one of these topics, expression and language.

Merleau-Ponty's discussion of expression is of particular significance in that it offers an alternative to the postmodern views about the slip- periness of meaning when the exclusive focus is on the language sys- tem. While incorporating Saussere's insights about language system, Merleau-Ponty's primary focus is on communication as embodiment.

He begins by pointing out that it is through our bodies that we commu- nicate with the world. Physical objects are understandable through a "semantics of perception." Their meaning, as well as the meaning of other people and the social world, is communicated through a medium which is not itself the meaning. For example, the meaning of a paint- ing or piece of music is mediated through the display of colors or sounds. The most basic way in which human communication occurs is This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. Paths of Understanding 141 through bodily gestures. These bodily expressions, which include facial expressions, gait, posture, and movements of our arms and legs, com- municate meaning at a more primordial mode of understanding than linguistic communication. Linguistic communication presupposes this primordial mode and draws upon the meaning which is already com- municated at the level.

Expression through language is first of all a physical act in which we push breath through our vocal chords and tighten and loosen them as we alter the position of our tongues and the shape of our months to effect variations in the sounds we produce (or in writing we tap the keys of a computer or make marks on a piece of paper). These bodily actions are employed to communicate our meanings to others. Com- munication with others through speech takes place within the context of the full range of bodily gestural communication When communicat- ing through speech, the realm of gestural communication is enlarged to include the meanings communicated through accents, cadence, pitch,and loudness.

Contact with other persons is established through the perception of each other's body and through the primordial communication occurs between people as they experience of each other's physiognomy and gestural movements. "It is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Hence- forth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenom- enon" (1945/1962, p. 354).

Given the significance he gives to meaning communicated through gestural communication, Merleau-Ponty, nevertheless, maintains that the most important phenomenon in the perception of other people is language. In the experience of dialogue, a common ground is consti- tuted between the other person and myself.

"My thought and the thought of the other is interwoven into a single fabric" (1945/1962, p.

354).

Neither of us invented the language that enables us to communi- cate, but through it "our perspectives merge into each other, and wecoexist through a common world" (1945/1962, p. 354).

At his death Merleau-Ponty was working on a new book, whose incomplete manuscript was published posthumously under the title The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968). Merleau-Ponty's intent was to penetrate lived experience into a region that lies below the catego- ries of subject and object and other dualities. He felt his earlier works, which treated these dualities as ambiguities of doubtful meaning, had not gathered them together into a single whole. The extant manuscript consists of 160 pages of apparently finished methodological introduc- tion followed by a chapter titled "The intertwining—the chiasm" and 110 pages of working notes (Cullen, 1994).

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly. 142 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994 Merleau-Ponty's overriding concern is to offer a description of expe- rience that gets beneath the deceptive distinction between extension (the visible) and thought (the invisible). He does not hold that exten- sion and thought are identical; rather "they are the obverse and the reverse of one another" (1964/1968, p. 152). At the most fundamental and primordial level of lived experience, the two aspects of the whole, thought and extension are so intertwined that they are the same ele- ment. The intertwined at this deepest level is termed the flesh by Merleau-Ponty. He is seeking to rediscover what there is before reflec- tion creates a cleavage between thought and extension. He locates the place where these two dimensions cross in the lived body. The livedbody both sees and feels and is seen and felt. At the deepest level of penetration into one's own flesh, one comes upon an anonymous gen- erality where by a sort of crossing over in which the person experiences a lack of differentiation from others and from the world. The inter- twined flesh of our lived bodies is experienced as an expression flesh of the world.

The approach Merleau-Ponty proposes for the interrogation of the deepest levels of experience (those that exist prior to our loosening the entwined threads of thought and extension) is the method of a hyperdialectic. Unlike Hegel's dialectic, hyperdialectic is a dialectic without synthesis and one that remains aware that every thesis is but an abstraction from the lived world of experience. Thus, there is no final knowledge, no ultimate synthesis that integrates all into one con- cept. In this understanding he differs from empiricism and rationalism, which sought a method that would resolve the ambiguities and produce a certain truth. For Merleau-Ponty there is no path along which cer- tain truth is assured. Instead we are to traverse over the lived world, opening up concepts and reality without claim to know them objec- tively. His mode of interrogation can provide psychology with a philo- sophical understanding of human existence that is adequate to replace our limiting and discredited philosophies of empiricism and rationalism (Gordon, 1993).

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Footnotes lrThis manuscript is based on my Division 24 presidental address, Reconstructing an abode for psychology, given at the 102th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Los Angels, CA.

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association o\ r one of its allied publishers.

This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual u\ ser and is not to be disseminated broadly.