merleau-ponty's notion of pre-reflective intentionality

MARTINA REUTER

MERLEAU-PONTY’S NOTION OF PRE-REFLECTIVEINTENTIONALITY ∗

ABSTRACT. This article presents an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre-reflective intentionality, explicating the similarities and differences between his andHusserl’s understandings of intentionality. The main difference is located in Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl’snoesis-noemastructure. Merleau-Ponty seems to claim thatthere can be intentional acts which are not of or about anything specific. He defines in-tentionality by its “directedness”, which is described as a bodily, concrete spatial motility.Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intentionality is part of his attempt to rewrite the re-lation between the universal and the particular. He claims that meaning is intrinsic to thephenomenal field and impossible to analyse by a distinction between form and matter. Still,Merleau-Ponty’s notion of meaning and philosophy is strictly opposed to any naturalizedphilosophy. This becomes explicated at the end of the article, where his attempt to embodyintentionality is compared to Daniel Dennett’s corresponding approach.

In this paper I will present an account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notionof intentionality. Ever since Franz Brentano’s introduction of the conceptof intentionality into contemporary discussions, intentionality and inten-tional acts have been described by two metaphors,viz., asdirectedtowardssomething and asof or aboutsomething. Brentano described intentionalityas “reference to a content, direction towards an object” and defined “mentalphenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an ob-ject intentionally within themselves” (1973, 88–89). Brentano’s definitionhas been influential among, if not always uncritically accepted by, philoso-phers belonging to the analytical as well as the phenomenological tradition(e.g., Husserl 1913/62, 229; Føllesdal 1984, 31–41; Dennett 1989, 15).

The two metaphors1 of beingdirectedandof or aboutare usually seenas describing the same relation, even though the meaning of being directedtowards something and being about something are quite different. I will belooking at how Merleau-Ponty seems to understand these metaphors andwhy he seems to prefer the explication of intentional acts as being directedtowards something, rather than containing an intentional object.

First, I will consider the explicit debt Merleau-Ponty pays to Husserl,and then I will look at how he describes embodied pre-reflective intention-ality. I will then explicate the main differences between Merleau-Ponty’sand Husserl’s understandings of intentionality. I will describe the dis-

Synthese118: 69–88, 1999.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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tinctions Husserl makes between matter and form and then look at howMerleau-Ponty criticizes this distinction. Finally, I will briefly try to ex-plicate some differences between Merleau-Ponty’s approach and anotherattempt to embody intentionality that has been made within the frameworkof cognitive science by the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

1. OPERATIVE INTENTIONALITY IN THE LIVED WORLD

Merleau-Ponty does not present any theory of intentionality. Instead, hestudies specific intentional acts that are located in the context of other actsand experiences. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical starting point is the lastphase of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as it was explicated inThe Crisisof European Sciences(1954/70) and in other at that time unpublished man-uscripts. He sees Husserl’s recognition of the Lifeworld, theLebenswelt, asthe most significant insight of phenomenology. As does Husserl, Merleau-Ponty views the field of perception as the very heart of the Lifeworld.Phenomenology should give an account of this perceptual experience.According to Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’s perspective in theCrisis, allmeaning is produced in the encounter between the subject and the alreadygiven world. It is the nature of this encounter that Merleau-Ponty sets outto study.

In his preface to thePhenomenology of Perception, which is the sectionof the book where Merleau-Ponty most explicitly comments on his philo-sophical heritage, he notes the importance of the distinction Husserl madebetweenintentionality of actand operative intentionality (fungierendeIntentionalität).2 The intentionality of act is the intentionality of judgingsand other voluntary undertaken positings, while operative intentionality is“that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the worldand of our life” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii; cf. 1960/62, 165).3

Husserl made a distinction between two types of intentional constitu-tion at many stages of his philosophical development. In theCartesianMeditations, he distinguishes active and passive genesis, and writes that in“active genesis the Ego functions as productively constitutive, by meansof subjective processes that are specifically acts of the Ego” (Husserl1953/88, 77). Everything created through this activity presupposes a pas-sivity that gives something beforehand (Husserl, 1953/88, 78). Husserlrecognizes the importance of this passive genesis and characterizes it byits general principle, association. He compares this association with DavidHume’s principle of association and emphasizes the difference between thetwo principles; his own is an intrinsically intentional association (Husserl1953/88, 80).

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Later on, inThe Crisis, this conception of operative intentionality mo-tivates many of Husserl’s critical claims, for example, when he criticizesKant for being unable to grasp the “understanding ruling in concealment,i.e., ruling as constitutive of the always already developed and always fur-ther developing meaning-configuration, the ‘intuitively given surroundingworld’ ” (Husserl 1954/70, 104). According to Husserl, Kant’s inquiries intheCritique of Pure Reasonhave an unquestioned ground of presupposi-tions which codetermine the meaning of his questions. Kant presupposesthe everyday surrounding world of life as existing, and this presupposi-tion leaves the structure of the lived world and its operative intentionalityunexplicated.

Merleau-Ponty is mainly focusing on the mode of intentionality thatHusserl conceptualizes as operative intentionality. According to him, thisintentionality is more clearly “apparent in our desires, our evaluations andthe landscape we see, . . . than in objective knowledge”. Operative inten-tionality furnishes “the text which our knowledge tries to translate intoprecise language” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii). Operative intentionalityis the intentionality of the lived world. This broad notion of intention-ality distinguishes phenomenological ‘comprehension’ from traditional‘intellection’ or reflection. Operative intentionality is the intentionality ofphenomenological comprehension.

In comprehensive understanding thewhole intentionactive, for exam-ple, in the perception of a thing or a historical event, is comprehended.Merleau-Ponty compares this understanding to the finding of the Idea in aHegelian sense, but this Idea includes very tangible and material aspectssuch as “the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the peb-ble, the glass or the piece of wax” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii). Mostimportant is that phenomenological comprehension makes a ‘phenom-enology of origins’ possible, i.e., an understanding of this comprehensionunveils how the world appears to us.

Merleau-Ponty distinguishes comprehensive understanding fromknowledge concerning only what things are for representation, i.e., the‘properties’ of things perceived, the mass of ‘historical facts’ or the ‘ideas’of a doctrine. That is, he distinguishes phenomenological understand-ing from the knowledge of objective thought, of empiricism as well asof intellectualism.

2. INTENTIONALITY AS PRE-REFLECTIVE MOTILITY

Husserl’s main contribution to phenomenology was, according to Merleau-Ponty, his introduction of operative intentionality. Merleau-Ponty takes as

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his own task to show how this intentionality is essentially intentionalityof the body-subject. Merleau-Ponty’s basic intentionality is the body-subject’s concrete, spatial and pre-reflective directedness towards the livedworld. The pre-reflective movingbodyis in itself intentional, “reaching outtowards the world”. In order to understand intentionality, it is important notto abstract the mind from the body, but to see how they are intertwined.The body here is not the physiological abstraction of the natural sciences,but the lived and experienced body. Using Descartes’s terminology, onemay say that the lived body is as well extended as thinking, or ratherthat it precedes any distinction or union between the two. Commentingon Merleau-Ponty’s view of the original incarnation of thought, prior toany theoretical or practical position, Emmanuel Levinas points out thatthis original incarnation is prior also to any synthesis betweenres extensaandres cogitans(1983/94, 97).

Martin C. Dillon has pointed out that though intentional, Merleau-Ponty’s lived body does not function as the transcendental ego of Kantor Husserl, i.e., it is not the sole foundation of meaning. The body has ameaning-bestowing function, grounded in its motility and perceptual syn-thesis, but that is only one part of the constituting process. The world is alsoquestioning the body-subject, and motility is a response to the questions ofthe world. Dillon emphasizes that the “active, constituting, centrifugal roleof the body, its transcendental operation, is inconceivable apart from itsreceptive, responsive, centripetal role before the givenness of the world”(Dillon 1988, 146).

Spatial motility is at the bottom of all forms of intentionality, accord-ing to Merleau-Ponty, while symbolic level intentionality depends on thisbasic intentionality. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intentionality can perhapsbe seen as an attempt to render the metaphor describing intentionality as‘directedness towards things’ concrete. Intentionality is a concrete spatialdirection of an attitude or posture towards objects as they appear in theworld.

Merleau-Ponty’s description of embodied basic intentionality is basedon his critique of the conception of the human body as a physical objectamong other objects. The human body, or, according to Merleau-Ponty’sway of description, my body, is never a fragment of extended matter, andthis lived body does not occupy any fragment of space (Merleau-Ponty1945/62, 102). In fact, there would not be any space for me, if I did nothave a body.4 In this sense our body constitutes our space, but the body-subject is not a sufficient condition for the existence of space. The givenworld is also required.


The human bodyis, strictly speaking, notin space (or time), accordingto Merleau-Ponty, but weinhabit space and time (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,139). Bodily space and external space form apractical system, in whichbodily space is the background against which objects may stand out –they become visible and function as goals for action. This means thatbodily being in space makes directed projects possible. This directed orintentional spatiality is essentially motility, and from this it follows that anunderstanding of space requires an analysis of movement.

Merleau-Ponty analyses motility by studying basic bodily movement,such as grasping vs. pointing at one’s nose. He does this through an analy-sis of deviant cases, described in psychological and neurophysiologicalstudies, showing how the study of impaired abilities manifests features ofbodily actions which are not recognizable in “normal” cases. This analysisis a dialectical critique of empiricist as well as of intellectualist modelsof explanation. Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to show that movement cannot beunderstood by an analysis of stimuli and reaction.

Merleau-Ponty analysed the case of Schneider, a war veteran who waswounded by a shell splinter in the back of his head and suffered from whattraditional psychiatry called “psychic blindness”. Schneider experiencedgreat problems when performing abstract movements at command, suchas pointing at his nose when the doctor asked him to, but “the patientperforms with extraordinary speed and precision the movements neededin living his life, provided that he is in the habit of performing them:he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose, takes amatch out of a box and lights a lamp” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 103).The differences between abstract and concrete movement shown by theseexamples cannot be given a neurophysiological explanation, because anabstract and a concrete movement may physiologically be exactly thesame. According to Merleau-Ponty, the injury affected Schneider’s livedworld. Schneider experienced concrete situations as given and was able toact in them, but he was unable to ‘project’ a situation for himself in theway needed for smoothly performed abstract movement (Merleau-Ponty1945/62, 110–112).

Merleau-Ponty shows that body movement cannot be understood eitheras causal physiological reactions, as empiricist explanations claim, or asdirected by conscious intentions, as cognitivist psychology understandsit. Motility is not merely physiological and it is not the ‘handmaid’ ofconsciousness. Neither is a combination of cognitivist and physiologi-cal explanations sufficient. The distinction between concrete and abstractmovement cannot be understood by relating certain movements to physi-ological mechanisms and others to consciousness; the distinction between

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concrete and abstract should not be confused with the distinction betweenbody and consciousness. The difference between concrete and abstractdoes not belong to the reflective dimension, which separates the consciousfrom the bodily, “but finds its place only in the behavioural dimension”(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 124). There ismeaninginvolved here, accord-ing to Merleau-Ponty, and motility can be understood only through itsintentionality.

Schneider’s inabilities cannot be explained by the ‘objective thought’shared by empiricists and intellectualists; these inabilities can only begiven a phenomenological description and understood by the phenomeno-logical concept of intentionality. Schneider’s inability to project a situationfor his actions makes visible what Merleau-Ponty calls theintentional arc.This intentional arc is inseparably motion, vision and comprehension; it isprior to the separation of different abilities. As an unitary ability, the in-tentional arc situates human subjects in relation to their space, past, future,human setting, physical, ideological and moral situation.5 The intentionalarc is a fundamental function which underlies other separate functionssuch as movement, perception or intelligence. It brings about the unityof the senses, of motility and intelligence. In the case of Schneider, asin other cases of impaired abilities, it was this arc which “went limp”(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 135–136; cf. Langer 1989, 46).

There is an ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s claim here. In one context heconcludes that “motility is basic intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,137), while the intentional arc is described as a function underlying allseparate abilities, i.e., also motility. This could be understood so thatmotility is the most basic experienced or observable form of intention-ality. This form is more basic than, for example, observations about ourmental states. As a function underlying all separate functions, the inten-tional arc is ahypothetical abstraction, abstracted from observable formsof intentionality.6

Merleau-Ponty’s explicit discussions of intentionality mainly involvebasic levels of spatial motion and perception, but he also draws on someexamples involving habitual skills. His main example is drawn from an ex-perienced organist who is able, after only one hour of practice, to performhis program on an unfamiliar organ with more or fewer manuals than theone he is used to. This ability can not be due to an intellectual study ofvarious manuals, nor to the training of new reflexes, as the intellectualistand the empiricist, respectively, would claim. Instead, the organist com-prehends the organ on a pre-reflective level and makes it part of his projectto perform the music (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 144–145).


3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE‘ DIRECTEDNESS’ ASPECT

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intentionality focuses on the ways in whichpersons are directed towards their world. Intentional acts are primarilydirected toward the lived world as a whole and the phenomenon of in-tentionality is understandable only through its pre-reflective ability to bedirected. This intentionality does not require the existence of any otherobjects – real or intentional – than the given world (or the ‘project ofexistence’, if one wants to give this an existentialist flavour). Throughthis directedness separate intentional objects or phenomena emerge, andMerleau-Ponty’s theory of perception is mainly a discussion of how thishappens and what these objects are like.

Merleau-Ponty discusses the nature of intentional acts and objects at aconcrete level; most elaboratedly in his studies of how perceptual phenom-ena emerge, but also in connection with language, other types of action,and inter-subjectivity. He does not define intentional acts as having con-tent. His notion of the intentional arc can be seen as an attempt to providea structural understanding of thedirectednessof intentionality, but he doesnot separately discuss the structure of itsaboutness. Merleau-Ponty com-ments on the idea of an intentional content mainly when he claims whatit is not. The absence of a discussion about intentional content constitutesan important difference between the phenomenologies of Merleau-Pontyand Husserl, whose philosophy, especially in the middle phase ofIdeasand Cartesian Meditations, placed great importance on the study of thenoema, i.e., the content of experience or intentional object.7

Intentional content is not composed of mental representations, accord-ing to Merleau-Ponty. This point was clearly made already by Husserl,who in Ideas Iclaimed that the ascription of a representative function toperception and other intentional experience brings about an endless regress(Husserl 1913/62, 243).8 This is so because, if the intentional object is arepresentation of a real object, then one is beset with the problem of howtwo realities, one mental and one external, can confront each other, espe-cially when only one of these is present and possible. The representationwould have to be taken as the real object and then represented again in asecond-order intentional act. This gives rise to an infinite regress withoutsolving the fundamental problem about how the immanent and the realobjects are related to each other.9

Husserl emphasized that intentional acts are about real objects, i.e.,about what is given in experience. These real objects should then be“bracketed”, but this phenomenological reduction does not mean that theirreality is thrown away, or still less that the objects are transferred inside

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the mind. The phenomenologist may not make judgements that rely on theaffirmation of a transcendent nature, but she or he may make judgementsto the effect that perception is the consciousnessof a real world (Husserl1913/62, 244).

According to Merleau-Ponty, consciousness should not be understoodas explicit positing of its objects, but as a more ambiguous reference toa practical object; as being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 139).This does not mean that pre-reflective intentionality is unconscious. Dis-cussing love, experienced before explicit awareness of its nature, Merleau-Ponty concludes that, this love was not “a thing hidden in my unconscious-ness;” it was not something I was unaware of. But this love was not “anobject before my consciousness” either. It was “the impulse carrying metowards someone” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 381). The love of this exam-ple is a directed act of awareness, but it does not have a distinct intentionalobject, ornoemain Husserl’s terminology. It is a pre-reflective intentionalact in the sense that it is directed without allowing for a reflective under-standing of either the manner in which it is directed or the object towardswhich the unspecific awareness is directed.10

In his understanding of intentionality, Merleau-Ponty seems to separatethe aspects of beingdirectedand beingof or about. Being directed is anecessary condition for an intentional act, while this act may or may nothave a distinguishable intentional object. The body as subject is directedtowards the world and can in this way get in touch with phenomena thatemerge through this act. This process is the basis for all more complexmental acts.

So, Merleau-Ponty seems to claim that there can be intentional actswhich are not of or about anything specific, i.e., which do not have anoesis-noemastructure. This separates Merleau-Ponty from the contempo-rary analytical (also analyticalpro phenomenology) view on intentionality,which sees being directed and being about or of as the same thing; i.e.,intentional states are directed because they are about something. For ex-ample, Dagfinn Føllesdal, in one interpretation of Husserl’s notion ofintentionality, writes that; “To bedirected simply is to have a noema”(Føllesdal 1984, 4).11

Merleau-Ponty can perhaps be seen to motivate his emphasis on di-rect ‘directedness’ in the preface toPhenomenology of Perception, wherehe writes, “ ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something’; there isnothing new in that. Kant showed [. . .] that inner perception is impossiblewithout outer perception, that the world, as a collection of connected phe-nomena, is anticipated in the consciousness of my unity, and is the meanswhereby I come into being as a consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,


xvii). Merleau-Ponty continues by explaining that the unity of the world,lived as ready-made before it is posited by knowledge in any specific act ofidentification, is what distinguishes the phenomenological notion of inten-tionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object. Thus, specific forphenomenology and its understanding of intentionality is the recognition itgives to the pre-reflective given-ness of the world. This given-ness meansthat the subject is pre-reflectively directed towards the world. The mostimportant task for phenomenology is to understand the true nature of thepre-reflective.

4. PREGNANT MATTER AND INCARNATE SUBJECTS

Merleau-Ponty undertakes little direct critique of Husserl in hisPhe-nomenology of Perception, but he makes some critical comments on thephenomenology of Husserl’s second period, i.e., the phenomenology of theIdeas(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 60, 243). On the explicit level, Merleau-Ponty mainly sees Husserl’s position asincomplete.12 Husserl was unableto explicate the nature of the relationship between pre-reflective inten-tionality and the given world, and Merleau-Ponty introduces the insightsof Gestalt psychology in order to continue Husserl’s project. Accord-ing to Merleau-Ponty, some problematic internal tensions in Husserl’sphenomenological project are related to the distinction between the con-stituting intentional act,noesis,13 and the intentional object, thenoema(Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 165).

The analysis of thenoesis-noemastructure is an essential part ofHusserl’s transcendental phenomenology as it is presented in theIdeas I.In his study of the intentional act,noesis, Husserl distinguishes between amaterial and a noetic side of phenomenological being. The material shouldbe studied byhyletically phenomenologicalreflexions and analyses, whilethe reflexions and analyses relating to noetic phases are namednoeticallyphenomenological. Husserl states that, “[t]he incomparably more impor-tant and fruitful analyses belong to the noetical side” (Husserl 1913/62,230).

The distinction between the noetic and the material is developed out ofthe distinction Husserl makes between genuine intentional experience andunitarysensileexperiences. These latter experiences are sensory contents,such as color, touch and sound, or sensile impressions, such as pain or plea-sure, and they are components of more comprehensive experiences whichare intentional, but they are not in themselves intentional. The concreteintentional experience takes form and shape through the agency of an an-

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imating or “meaning-bestowing” stratum, lying over the sensile elements(Husserl 1913/62, 226–227).

What Husserl does is to give a new phenomenological expression tothe distinction between matter and form. Husserl is very explicit on thisand he describes the sensile with the Greek word for matter,hyle, andthe intentional with the word for form or shape,morphe. The “remarkableduality and unity” of these two components gives rise to the whole of thephenomenological domain. Intentional experiences are a unity of matterand form, and they come to being when sensible data “offer themselvesas material for intentional informings or bestowals of meaning at differentlevels” (Husserl 1913/62, 227).14

Merleau-Ponty’s purpose is to show that intentionality does not presentthings composed of distinguishable form and matter. Taking hold of claimsmade by Husserl inIdeas II, where he questions the possibility of distin-guishing components of experience, Merleau-Ponty tries to develop thisline of thinking further. In an essay on Husserl in the collectionSigns,he points out that “perhaps we do not have to think about the world andourselves in terms of the bifurcation of Nature and mind” (1960/64, 162).Merleau-Ponty continues by claiming that, from Husserl’sIdeas II on, itseems “clear that reflection does not install us in a closed, transparent mi-lieu, and that it does not take us (at least not immediately) from “objective”to “subjective”, but that its function is rather to unveil a third dimensionin which this distinction becomes problematic” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,162). Merleau-Ponty wants to study this third dimension.

According to Merleau-Ponty, subjects living in the world come intouch with emergingphenomena, in themselves “matter pregnant withform”.15 Merleau-Ponty based his conclusions on a dialectical combina-tion of Husserl’s phenomenology and the insights of Gestalt psychology,especially the Gestaltist claim about the figure-on-a-background as themost basic unit of experience. Gestalt psychologists showed that there areneither any perceptual atoms postulated by empirists nor any Husserlianhyletic data (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 3–5; cf. Dillon 1988, 58–60). Asthe second step of this dialectical combination, Merleau-Ponty used thephenomenological reduction introduced by Husserl in order to “bracket”the naturalism of scientific Gestalt psychology.16

The synthesis between Gestalt psychology and phenomenology showsthat phenomena, as Gestalt, do not appear by the external unfolding ofsome pre-existing reason or law, as is argued by different forms of tran-scendental philosophy, also by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.There is no pre-existing model on which phenomena are built up, no form(morphe) in that sense. This means that, according to Merleau-Ponty, there


are no standardized or pre-existent qualities, or other types of Husserlianpositional characters. The phenomena can be seen as a kind of form, butthis form is, according to Merleau-Ponty, “the very appearance of theworld and not the condition of its possibility; it is the birth of a norm andis not realized according to a norm; it is the identity of the external and theinternal and not the projection of the internal in the external” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 61). Merleau-Ponty claims that meaning is intrinsic to thephenomenal field, and this claim is a phenomenological derivation of theGestalt psychologist claim that organization is intrinsic to the perceptualfield (cf. Dillon 1988, 65–66).

Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is illuminated by a comparison betweenhis position and the position of his contemporary Aron Gurwitsch, whoalso criticized Husserl’s distinction betweenmorpheandhylewith the helpof the findings of Gestalt psychologists. Gurwitsch claims that this distinc-tion cannot be made even at a conceptual level. In the spirit of Gestaltpsychology he points out that understanding requires the signs which areto be understood to have a certain physiognomy, which means that theyhave to be articulated in a specific way, even as “physical” objects.

Gurwitsch explicates his point with the help of an example concerningChinese letters: If Chinese letters are presented to one person who knowsChinese and one who does not, the difference between the two perceptiveacts is not only that the first person understands and the second does not.The letters alsolook differentin front of the two persons. This means thatwhat is immediately given to the two persons is not the same object. Gur-witsch continues, “[h]olding that hyletic data are organized and articulatedby meaning-bestowing and understanding acts, one cannot say that theappearance of the word on paper as a physical event is, with respect toits sensuous aspect, left unchanged by the animating acts. In this case, themental aspect of the expression forms and articulates its physical aspect”(Gurwitsch 1966, 255). In order to take this into account, Husserl, claimingthathyle in itself is formless, would have to assume a third noetic interme-diary stratum between the sensuous hyletic and the meaning-bestowingact. Gurwitsch claims that even if Husserl would make this assumption,he still has the problem whether hyletic data, with respect to their “sensu-ous appearance”, really remain unchanged with regard to different noesesoperating upon them.

Gurwitsch’s example suggests that there is no clear distinction betweenthe matter and the content of the letter: Our understanding or non-understanding of the content affects the material shape of the letter in frontof us.17 In his interpretation of Husserl’snoema, Gurwitsch identified senseand appearance and claimed that the perceptualnoemais a concrete sen-

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suous appearance, in which the phenomenological primal material is givenonly as articulated and structured. But, Gurwitsch still remained withina transcendental mode of understanding and did not abandon Husserl’sthesis of the atemporality of meaning or the Husserlian distinction betweennoesisandnoema(cf. Dillon 1988, 71). In agreement with Merleau-Ponty,he claimed that the sense of perceptual acts is incorporated and incarnatedin the very appearances themselves (cf. Dreyfus 1982, 117), but he did notincarnate the meaning-giving subject in a corresponding way. This made itimpossible for his subject to exist with the perceived objects and participatein the constitution of perceptual meaning, and according to Hubert Drey-fus, Gurwitsch was forced to reinterpret the noesis as a simple experiencingof the presented Gestalts or noema-appearances (Dreyfus 1982, 121).

Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is based on his notion of the intentionalbody-subject, bestowing meaning while it is present with other objects inthe field. He is explicit in his critique of what he characterizes as Husserl’sidealist position in theIdeas I. Merleau-Ponty writes that it is “charac-teristic of idealism to grant that all significance is centrifugal, being anact of significance orSinn-gebung, and that there are no natural signs.To understand is ultimately always to construct, to constitute, to bringabout here and now the synthesis of the object. Our analysis of one’s ownbody and of perception has revealed to us a relation to the object, i.e., asignificance deeper than this” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 428–429). Here,beneath the intentionality of judgings or acts, Merleau-Ponty finds oper-ative intentionality. He claims that every active process of signification,every Sinn-gebung, is derivative and secondary in relation to the “preg-nancy of meaning within signs which could serve to define the world”(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 429). InSigns, Merleau-Ponty also discussesthis “pre-theoretical constitution” which accounts for pre-given kernels ofmeaning. Concerning these pre-givens it may as well be said that they arealready constituted for us, or that they are never completely constituted.This means that “consciousness is always behind or ahead of them, nevercontemporaneous” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 165). This process of consti-tuting does not take place by “grasping a content as an exemplification ofa meaning or an essence” and the process “could not possibly reach com-pletion in the intellectual possession of a noema” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,165). Merleau-Ponty concludes that there is “an ordered sequence of steps,but it is without end as it is without beginning” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,165).18

Meaning is at the same time universal and temporal. In perception andunderstanding, the subject brings her or his sensory field and perceptualfield with her or him, and in the last resort, “I bring a schema of all possible


being, a universal setting in relation to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,429). This universal setting is the phenomenal field. It is important toobserve that the phenomenal field is a phenomenological derivation, it isnot a natural structure or organic trait. I think that the phenomenal fieldshould be seen as Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s notion ofthe transcendental structure of the Lifeworld.

Husserl’s Lifeworld, as it is explicated inThe Crisis, has a generalstructure, that transgresses culturally diverse facts and truths.19 DifferentLifeworlds contain different objects, but these worlds have a general struc-ture through which their objects can be identified as objects of a Lifeworld.According to Husserl, this “general structure, to which everything thatexists relatively is bound, is not itself relative” (1954/70, 139). The mostgeneral trait of the Lifeworld is its spatio-temporality. Husserl emphasizesthat this spatio-temporality is not a question of ideal mathematical points,“pure” straight lines or planes, or the Kantian geometricala priori. Theactual bodies of the Lifeworld are not bodies in the sense of physics. Thecategorical features of the Lifeworld are not concerned with the theoreticalidealizations of the geometrician or the physicist, but forms a Lifeworlda priori, which is the basis for mathematical and other objectivea priori(Husserl 1954/70, 140).

There is no reason to think that Merleau-Ponty abandoned this general-ity of the Lifeworld, and he is explicit in describing the phenomenal fieldas a universal setting. Through thea priori of the Lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty relates himself to a transcendental phenomenological framework.He emphasizes the complex nature of the relation between the natural andthe transcendental displayed by a phenomenological reduction which isnever completed and which does not reveal fixed essences. The naturaland transcendental attitudes do not exist side by side or sequentially, likethe false or apparent and the true. InSigns, he writes that it “is the naturalattitude itself which goes beyond itself in phenomenology – and so it doesnot go beyond itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 164).

In a short reflection on the philosophical relation between Merleau-Ponty and himself, Gurwitsch (1966, n349) points out that Merleau-Ponty does not undertake any analysis of perception with respect to thenoetico-noematic structure, but has instead related perception to the ‘corpsphénoménal’, which Gurwitsch translates as the organism. According toGurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty refers the structure of perception to corporealorganization. Gurwitsch’s interpretation of the phenomenological body asan organism seems to detach it from its setting in the Lifeworld and transferit into a biologistic approach. I think this is a mistaken interpretation of thecorps phénoménal.

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Instead, I would say that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of how thesubject participates in the generation of meaning saves him from Gur-witsch’s strained conclusions about a passive subject. Merleau-Ponty tookthe trouble of showing how the noesis, the meaning-giving activity of thesubject, is an intrinsically incarnate process which introduces the subject tolikewise intrinsically meaningful phenomena in the lived world. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bodily pre-reflective intentionality saved his subject frombeing reduced to a mere passive receiver.

5. MERLEAU-PONTY VS. DENNETT

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological anti-naturalism constitutes one maindifference between his approach and most attempts to embody intention-ality from the perspectives of analytical philosophy and cognitive science.In this concluding section of my paper I will try to illuminate these differ-ences by comparing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis with theapproach presented by Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s position is perhaps notthe philosophically most sophisticated one, but I have chosen it becauseit is commonsensical by nature and has become rather influential outsidestrictly philosophical circles, e.g., among cognitive scientists.

Dennett takes an explicitly unphenomenological position when he de-fines his own – as he calls it – tactical choice. He declares his “startingpoint to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physicalsciences” (1989, 5), and emphasizes that philosophy is allied and contin-uous with these sciences. He wants to see what the mind looks like fromthe third-person, materialistic perspective of science, and he is ready tobet on this being the best perspective for a contemporary understandingof mental phenomena. We are told that this conviction is not just built onprejudice, as Dennet has “shopped around” (1989, 7) – presumably also inthe supermarket of phenomenology.

At some points Dennett comments on the relationship between hisintentional stance and phenomenology. The main difference lies in thefirst-person perspective of phenomenology vs. the third-person perspectiveof Dennett. Dennett writes that, “[w]hereas Phenomenologists propose thatone can get to one’sownnotional world by some special somewhat intro-spectionist bit of mental gymnastics – called, by some, the phenomenolog-ical reduction – we are concerned with determining the notional world ofanother, from the outside” (1989, 153). According to Dennett, the traditionrepresented by Brentano and Husserl is a solipsisticauto-phenomenology,whereas he himself proposes an objectivehetero-phenomenology.Dennett’s rejection of a first-person perspective as meaningless is Wittgen-


steinian in spirit, but he does not develop the philosophical implications ofthis line of thought. He adopts a scientific third-person perspective insteadof elaborating his Wittgensteinian intuitions.

The difference between first- and third-person perspectives is relatedto the genuine difference between a Dennettian and a phenomenologicalperspective, i.e., the difference between seeing philosophy as continuouswith science vs. seeing philosophy as concerned with the foundations ofscience. I will focus on some differences between first- vs. third-personperspectives from this point of view.

Dennett’s intentional stance is based on the attribution of intentional-ity: A third-person observer attributes intentionality to a system when itsactions are best predicted and explained by this strategy (1989, 23–25).From Dennett’s point of view this is the most complete description wecan get of intentionality, nothing can be added by an additionally first-person perspective. The process of attribution in itself involves a subjectivestep when the observer takes the “decision to adopt the intentional stance”(Dennett 1989, 24), but this does not destroy the credibility of the stance,according to Dennett, because “the facts about the success or failure of thestance, were one to adopt it, are perfectly objective” (Dennett 1989, 24).

From Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological point of view, Dennett’sstance belongs to the realm of objective thought, characteristic of em-piricism as well as intellectualism. This stance reduces the “intentionalsystem” to an observable physical object, moved by different causes, oneof which is the intentionality attributed to the system by the observer. Thisis not the perspective from which we may understand intentionality, nei-ther as it is displayed in basic bodily movements nor in complex humanactions, according to Merleau-Ponty. For him the first-person perspectiveis irreducible.

Discussing the possibility of freedom at the end of hisPhenomenologyof Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the importance of separatinglived self-definition from third-person characterizations of human lives andexperiences. The experience of being “hunchbacked” or “jealous” remainssignificantly different from any external description of these experiences.Merleau-Ponty writes that, “[u]ntil the final coma, the dying man is inhab-ited by a consciousness, he is all that he sees, and enjoys this much of anoutlet. Consciousness can never objectify itself into invalid-consciousnessor cripple-consciousness, and even if the old man complains of his ageor the cripple of his deformity, they can do so only by comparing them-selves with others, or seeing themselves through the eyes of others, thatis, by taking a statistical and objective view of themselves, so that suchcomplaints are never absolutely genuine” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 434).

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Dennett’s intentional stance belongs to the realm of objective explanationand statistical prediction, it is an external description of human behaviorwhich does not grasp the genuine part of intentional experience.

Dennett’s stance in itself does not tell us what intentionalityis, it onlyshows us how intentionality functions in a certain setting. Following theWittgensteinian vein in Dennett’s thinking one might be satisfied withthis and claim that the issue is resolved. But, Dennett also provides adefinition of the intentionality attributed to observed systems. Dennett de-fines intentionality in relation to beliefs: an intentional system is a truebeliever (Dennett 1989, 15). This notion of intentionality is significantlynarrower than Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre-reflective intentionality, orHusserl’s notion, which is composed of the intentionality of act and oper-ative intentionality.20 The intentionality of perception is an essential partof the phenomenological notion of intentionality, but this aspect is left outof Dennett’s belief-centered definition. His attribution of intentionality isrestricted to the attribution of beliefs and does not include, for example,the attribution of meaningful perception. This is perhaps the most crucialproblem for Dennett’s strategy of embodying intentionality.

Dennett expands and embodies intentionality in the sense that he is ableto attribute it to clams and thermostats, but his understanding of whichkind of mental states may be intentional remains narrow. His notion ofintentionality is intellectualist in the sense that intentionality is restricted tothe intentionality of judgemental attitudes. The beliefs of intentional sys-tems might be unconscious – or even held by systems which lack any typeof consciousness – but these beliefs are still explicated as propositionalattitudes.

6. CONCLUSION

Merleau-Ponty and Dennett both try to show how embodied beings areintentional, but their strategies for doing this are quite different. Merleau-Ponty takes Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality as his startingpoint and shows how this pre-reflective intentionality is embodied as aposture vis-à-vis the world. He continues the strain in Husserl’s thinkingthat attempts to study consciousness outside a strictly intellectualist frame-work, shifting the emphasis away from the intentionality of beliefs andjudgings towards the intentionality of perception and emotions. Dennett’sway of embodying intentionality does not challenge these intellectualistpresuppositions.

Merleau-Ponty’s project remains in a strict sense philosophical, eventhough he uses many examples from the psychological and physiological


sciences. He is looking for a general structure of intentionality that liesbehind specific empirical findings. Dennett’s orientation is different: Hisaim is to provide an account of intentionality which is compatible with andbelongs to the same realm as scientific explanations. Dennett represents anattempt to naturalize philosophy, while Merleau-Ponty, according to myinterpretation, continues the anti-naturalist strain in Husserl’s thinking.

NOTES

∗ I am grateful to the members of the NOS-H Intentionality Project and Martin C. Dillonfor valuable comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Nordiska Samarbetsnämn-den för Humanistisk Forskning (NOS-H) for financing my research during the years 1995–1997.1 By emphasizing that the direction and aboutness of intentional acts are metaphoricaldescriptions, I do, of course, not imply that these descriptions are “mere metaphors”. Itis acknowledged and in several contexts argued that metaphors may have unreducabletheoretical significance for our understanding of phenomena as well as concepts. See e.g.,Black (1962, 1979) and Lloyd (1993).2 Husserl makes the distinction between the intentionality of act and operative intention-ality in hisFormal and Transcendental Logic, which, according to John Drummond, is themost important of Husserl’s later works for an understanding of his view on the structureof intentional acts (Drummond 1990, 176).3 Merleau-Ponty connects the importance of this distinction to some comments on Kantand indicates that intentionality of act is the only type of intentionality present in Kant’swork.4 Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of space is a descendant of Kant’s conception, but hedeparts from the Kantian view in some important respects. As Dillon puts it, “[o]pposinghimself to the assumption of the primordiality of objective space, Merleau-Ponty argues infavor of the primacy of lived space” (Dillon 1988, 135). According to Kant, our experienceof space is in necessary conformity to Euclidean geometry and thereforea priori. Fromthis it follows, that the senses area priori united and experience the same single space.Merleau-Ponty, as Husserl inCrisis, criticizes the objectivist claim that the experience ofEuclidian geometry is necessary, and from this it follows that he does not regard the unityof the senses as ana priori truth (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 221). Instead, he regards thediversity of the senses and the fact that we are in the world as necessary in this world,and thereforea priori, while the unity of the senses is something we conclude by movingin space. Merleau-Ponty criticizes the sharp Kantian distinction betweena priori andaposteriori; necessity is not a criterion for thea priori, which may be contingent. Thingsdiscovereda posteriori, as the unity of the senses, may becomea priori in the sense that we,living in this world, always have access to one world. But thisa priori remain contingent(cf. Hammond et al. 1991, 266–267).5 This can also be expressed so that the intentional arc projects space, future et al. roundabout the subject (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 136).6 The role of the intentional arc is difficult to understand also in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the senses are nota priori united. The intentional arc, with its unity ofthe senses, can not be understood asa priori; the human experience of moving around in

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a given world is prior to this unity. The intentional arc should probably be understood inaccordance with Merleau-Ponty’s loosening of thea priori – a posterioridistinction, as ana posterioriabstraction, which becomesa priori.7 I follow an interpretation of Husserl’s notion ofnoema, argued by John Drummond,according to which the noema is a technical term by which Husserl refers to the intentionalobject, i.e., the intended object as intended, e.g., the perceived as perceived (Drummond1990, 57).8 Merleau-Ponty’s notion of representation is mainly adopted from the psychological andneurophysiological texts he uses. He discusses mental representations e.g., in connectionto a case ofapraxia, which is a disorder of voluntary movement, leading to a more orless total inability to perform purposeful movements, in spite of intact muscular power andconscious understanding of what the request means (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 126, 138–139). Explanations of apraxia, utilizing the concept of representation to express awarenessof movement, are forced either to claim that the patient posits a representation, but lacksphysiological ability to move his limb, in which case the limb is paralyzed, or to claim thatthe physical ability is present, but the representation is lacking and movement thereforeimpossible. In this case apraxia is a form of agnosia; the patient has forgotten the repre-sentation. Neither of these explanations capture what is specific for apraxia, according toMerleau-Ponty. He states that, “[a]s long as consciousness is understood as representation,the only possible operation for it is to form representations” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 139).This statement reflects Husserl’s conclusion about mental representations leading to anendless regress.9 Husserl’s criticism of explanations using the notion of representations is one reason whyhe does not speak about ‘intentional objects’, which implies some kind of second-orderobjects, but prefers the concept of noema (cf. Husserl 1913/62, 242).10 Merleau-Ponty’s description of a pre-reflective intentional act resembles Descartes’description of the passion wonder (admiration). In his Passions of the SoulDescartesregards wonder as the first of all the passions, it is experienced before we may makeany judgements about the nature of the object, while other passions are evaluations ofobjects as beneficial or harmful (Descartes 1649/1985, 350). Cartesian wonder as wellas the pre-reflective love described by Merleau-Ponty is a non-evaluative, but directedattention towards something. For an illuminating comparison of Descartes’ wonder anda phenomenological attitude, see Heinämaa (1999).11 This interpretation is, of course, strongly backed up by many of Husserl’s own writings(e.g., Husserl 1913/62, 223, 233), as well as by Brentano’s original statement, where hedefined mental phenomena as “those phenomena which contain an object intentionallywithin themselves” (Brentano 1874/1973, 89). But, it is perhaps not the only possibleinterpretation of Husserl.12 By this I do not mean that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical inferences does not have radi-cal implications for Husserl’s phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty is much more explicit in hiscriticism of Husserl as well as Sartre in his late uncompleted workThe Visible and the In-visible, and I quite agree with M.C. Dillon that Merleau-Ponty’s late, explicitly ontologicalconclusions follow from his earlier phenomenology of perception (Dillon 1988).13 Husserl introduces the termnoetic phase, or noesis, because such terms as ‘phases ofconsciousness’, ‘awareness’ and even ‘intentional phases’ have become unusable throughequivocations introduced mainly by naturalistic psychology. Husserl states that “noesesconstitute the specifications of ‘Nous’ (mind, spirit)in the widest senseof the term, whichin all the actual forms of life which belong to it brings us back tocogitationes, and then to


intentional experiences generally, and therewith includes all that (and essentially only that)which is theeidetic presuppostition of the idea of a Norm” (Husserl 1913/62, 228–229).14 As experiencing subjects, we are not able to distinguish between the form and the hyleticmaterial of our intentional experiences, but Husserl suggests that the phenomenologistshould make this conceptual distinction in order to analyze experience (Haaparanta 1996,4).15 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes of “the symbolical ‘pregnancy’of form in content” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 291; cf. Dillon 1988, 67), referring to ErnstCassirer’sPhilosophie der symbolischen Formen. Merleau-Ponty does not draw any onto-logical conclusions from this ‘matter-pregnant-with-form’ before his lateThe Visible andthe Invisible, but there are good grounds to think that the foundation for this ontology wasmade when he introduced his notion of the phenomenon inPhenomenology of Perception(cf. Dillon 1988, 46, 52–55).16 Merleau-Ponty outlines his criticism of naturalistic conclusions of Gestalt psychologymainly in his earlyThe Structure of Behavior, and later refers to this criticism (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, n50–55, n59; cf. Dillon 1988, 68–70).17 It is interesting – but outside the scope of this paper – to compare Gurwitsch’s examplewith John Searle’s well known argument about the so-called Chinese room. Searle (1984,32–36) attempts to show that computers do not think by showing that the ability – of acomputer or person – to manipulate Chinese symbols does not in itself lead to an ability tounderstand Chinese. A person locked into a room may with the help of a technical manuallearn to combine Chinese letters in a manner that gives the impression of fluent Chinese,and he or she may master the syntax of Chinese without learning to understand Chinese.Searle’s argument rests on a strict distinction between syntax and semantics, betweenform and content of language, and it shows that computers do not think in the sense ofmastering semantics by referring to the definition of a computer as a system manipulatingmere syntax. Gurwitsch’s example implies that there is no such strict distinction betweensyntax and semantics.18 Immanuel Levinas’ modification of the phenomenological notion of intentionalityresembles at this point Merleau-Ponty’s notion. According to Levinas, consciousness en-counters the world as opaque. The world can never be fixed in a subject’s knowledge ofan unchanging essence. Levinas understands intentionality as the relationship with alterity(Levinas 1961/69, 121–26; Davis 1996, 21).19 Husserl is not universalizing in any naive sense. He, on the contrary, is explicitly awareof cultural differences when he writes that, “when we are thrown into an alien social sphere,that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, thefacts that for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same asours” (1954/70, 139).20 The definition of intentionality as the intentionality of beliefs has also been criticizedfrom inside Dennett’s own theoretical tradition. See e.g., Amélie Rorty (1988, 109-13).

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Department of PhilosophyP.O. Box 2400014 University of HelsinkiFinlande-mail: [email protected]

merleau-ponty's notion of pre-reflective intentionality

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