The secondary passivity: Merleau-Ponty at the limit of phenomenology
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The secondary passivity: Merleau‑Ponty at the limit of phenomenology Rajiv Kaushik1 Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper considers the move from passivity to a generative passivity in MerleauPonty’s ontology. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty calls this generative passivity a “secondary passivity” and in his passivity lectures he describes it as “passivity without passivism.” The paper argues that this secondary passivity must be understood in terms of an écart within the phenomena. That is, in terms of a separation and distance which is matrixed and configured within what appears. This is the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s statement in his passivity lectures that “the touchstone of a theory of passivity,” is a “notion of oneiric symbolism,” and why for him passivity is intimately connected to a “primordial symbol.” If the symbolic is so associated with passivity, the symbolic also does not concern origins but is both the ontological limit and divergence in phenomena. This association forces MerleauPonty to consider what it means for phenomenological reflection retrace its steps back to an initial event of expression and even whether phenomenology is ultimately served by description. Finally, this paper considers Merleau-Ponty’s attitude toward the literary usages of language as a means of doing a phenomenology of the secondary passivity. Keywords Merleau-Ponty · Phenomenology · Passivity lectures · Primordial passivity · Primordial symbolism · Literary usages of language The notion of passive-synthesis arises for Husserl as soon as he considers certain genetic features of the intentional correlation between apparent things and the consciousness to which those things appear. For example, it is not automatically the case that I see a thing as a spatial object. I see something as a spatial object because I am presented with one side together with its non-presented sides and am situated in relation to both sides at once. I have to be able to move around the thing, then, and its non-present sides have to go from hidden to perceived. This implies a dual * Rajiv Kaushik [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada
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movement: on the side of the spatial thing, the thing is distended into a horizon which has to constantly move into view; on the side of the consciousness, there is some aspect of its life opened out into that same distended horizon in order for it to then become actively object-oriented. This is a streaming-consciousness, Husserl says, a “field of passive doxa” in which the world and experience are treated together as the “horizon of all possible judgmental substrates.”1 The truly difficult point here is not really that at some point subjective life transcends itself and moves into objectivity; it is rather that, as Rudolf Bernet says, there is an intentionality that is pre-subjective and pre-objective, an intentionality without subject and object. There is an unexpected and s
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