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| Maurice Merleau-Ponty |
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| Stephen Priest |
Arguably, Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to philosophy is the thesis that subjectivity is physical, even if it was partly anticipated by Husserl and, even if, in the end, it should turn out to be false.
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2. Self-Consciousness
Merleau-Ponty maintains that all thought is self-conscious thought, and all self-conscious thought is consciousness of one’s own existence. It follows from this that all thought is, at least partly, a consciousness of ones own existence. Here is the claim that all thought is self-conscious and a putative justification of it:
All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no subject. (PPT, 371).
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It is not necessary either that the whole of A’s attention, so to speak, by absorbed by x but, if it is, this shows again that consciousness of thinking is not a condition for thinking.
There are compelling grounds for ruling out the possibility of being conscious of thinking a thought in thinking it. Not every thought could be a self-conscious thought in this sense because that would generate in infinite regress of necessary conditions. Being a self-conscious thought cannot be a prerequisite for being a thought.
If A is thinking about x then, to the extent that A is thinking about thinking about x, A is not thinking about x. if attention is a unitary phenomenon then thinking about x rules out thinking about anything other than x in thinking about x, including thinking about thinking about x.
A possible objection to this line of reasoning is that if A is thinking about thinking about x then A is thinking about x. this entailment does hold but whether what is entailed is true depends upon the point at issue.
Suppose Merleau-Ponty means by ‘self-consciousness’ (PPT, 371) (‘conscience de soi’ PP, 426) consciousness of the self, so that if a subject, A, thinks a thought then A is thereby conscious of A. Textual support may be added for this reasoning when Merleau-Ponty says:
At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find….a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, but not by observation as a given fact, but through direct contact with that existence. (PPT, 371)
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3 The Subject of Consciousness
Merleau-Ponty is arguably right, however, to maintain that in so far as a subject is conscious of its own mental processes that subject is thereby conscious of itself. This is because the mental processes of a subject, including those mental processes constitutive of that subject’s awareness of its own mental states, are partly constitutive of that subject. It follows that if a subject is aware of its own mental processes then it is aware of a part of itself and, in just that sense, aware if itself. It does not follow from this that it is aware of itself qua itself; only that it is itself that it is aware of.
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| "A 'Self-Conscious' painting of a drawing of myself looking out at myself through a Reliquary Mirror Mask". 2011, Acrylic on Board |
If a painting can be aware of itself being made, a painting shown in the process of itself being painted, from the viewpoint of the person painting it who is also within the painting, then it is aware of itself, in some sense, and so is a self-aware thing.
This is part of the force of Merleau-Ponty’s quasi-Heagelian claim that ‘it (the subject) is its knowledge…of itself’ (PPT, 371). Unlike Hegel, Merleau-Ponty cannot consistently maintain that that is all that a subject is because he holds that the subject of consciousness is physical; and no physical subject of consciousness is exhausted by its consciousness of itself.
Merleau-Ponty here is asserting that a subject is partly constituted by the consciousness it has of itself. I am partly my awareness of myself. This is logically consistent with my being my body, or even, essentially, my body, even though it does not follow that in being conscious of myself I am conscious of my body.
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Clearly, I may be self-conscious both by observation and by inference. For example, if I visually observe a part of my body then I am thereby conscious of myself because my body is at least a part of what I am. This is a kind of self-consciousness if I am conscious of my body and I know that I am (at least partly) my body. A being could in principle be conscious of the body that is its own without thereby being conscious that it is its own body that it is conscious of. We would rightly be reluctant to call this self-consciousness. Being conscious of oneself, the being that one is, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being self-conscious. If a being is conscious of itself and knows that it is itself that it is conscious of then that is sufficient for self-consciousness. On these a priori grounds it is coherent to suppose that there may be self-consciousness by observation. A posteriori this assumption is also clearly plausible.
If I have an idea of myself and know that I am what that idea is of, it follows that I am thereby self-conscious. If I infer from this genuine idea of myself that I exist then I know that I exist by inference from an idea of myself. That there exists self-consciousness by inference from an idea of oneself is coherent. Whether there is such self-consciousness is, broadly, an empirical question.
From this, it can argued that my recent painting has an idea of itself, as within the painting we can see how the painting has been made through time; the painting knows how it has been made because this process is recorded within the image in a real way and from observation.
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4 Immediacy
Suppose if A ‘recognizes’ A then A knows that A is, A knows that A is A and A may thereby know further facts about A. this leaves it open to what such recognition consists of psychologically, but we know the Merleau-Ponty has explicitly excluded two possibilities. Self-recognition is not self-knowledge by observation and self-recognition is not self-knowledge by inference from an idea of oneself.
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So, if Merleau-Ponty is right that there exists immediate self-recognition then either subject A knows itself without thereby constituting itself conceptually, or A knows itself punctually, or A knows itself without thereby having to know anything other than A, or some combination of these.
The idea that a subject knows itself by ‘direct contact’ with its own existence is also open to interpretation. This could just mean that A knows that A exists by some method that is neither perception nor inference. Or, it could mean that A knows that A exists by being A. Both readings are borne out by this:
Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action. The act whereby I am conscious of something must itself be apprehended at the very moment at which it is carried out, otherwise it would collapse. (PPT, 371-2)
This is partly the claim that all conscious acts are known to their agent but it is also the view that in being conscious I am conscious of myself in a way that is neither by observation nor by inference. Suppose I am (partly) a mind in action. Merleau-Ponty is saying that the ‘very being’ of such a mind is self-consciousness, so what it consists in to be a functioning mind is to be a self-conscious mind. This is entailed by his view that every act of consciousness is a self-conscious act. One candidate for the method of self-knowing that is neither observation nor inference is introspective self-consciousness: being inwardly aware of one’s own mental states, thereby, one’s existence.
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….if I am numerically identical with a self-conscious mind then it logically follows that I am self-conscious. This argument is valid and arguably sound. We can read ‘mind’ here as ‘something that has the capacity to think’ and ‘self-consciousness’ as; ‘x is self-conscious if and only if x is conscious of x and x knows that it is what it is thereby conscious of’.
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….empiricism is the thesis that all knowledge is derived from experience.
….and rationalism is the thesis that all knowledge is acquired by rational thought.
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Merleau-Ponty thinks that both the empiricist and the rationalist theories of the self are false. The two theories are mutually inconsistent and so at the most one of them can be true and at least one of them can be false.
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