The Concept of the Self

Socrates’s
Plato’s
Aquinas’s
“Who am I?” If Google’s autocomplete is any
indication, it’s not one of the questions we
commonly ask online (unlike other existential
questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or
“What is a human?”). But philosophers have long
held that “Who am I?” is in some way the central
question of human life. “Know yourself” was the
inscription that the ancient Greeks inscribed over
the threshold to the Delphic temple of Apollo, the
god of wisdom. In fact, self-knowledge is the
gateway to wisdom, as Socrates quipped: “The wise
person is the one who knows what he doesn’t
know.”
The reality is, we all lack self-knowledge to some
degree, and the pursuit of self-knowledge is a
lifelong quest—often a painful one. For instance, a
common phenomenon studied in psychology is the
“loss of a sense of self” that occurs when a familiar
way of thinking about oneself (for example, as “a
healthy person,” “someone who earns a good
wage,” “a parent”) is suddenly stripped away by a
major life change or tragedy.  Forced to face oneself
for the first time without these protective labels, one
can feel as though the ground has been suddenly cut
out from under one’s feet: Who am I, really?
But the reality of self-ignorance is something of a
philosophical puzzle.  Why do we need to work at
gaining knowledge about ourselves?  In other cases,
ignorance results from a lack of experience.  No
surprise that I confuse kangaroos with wallabies:
I’ve never seen either in real life.  Of course I don’t
know what number you’re thinking about: I can’t
see inside your mind.  But what excuse do I have
for being ignorant of anything having to do with
myself?  I already am myself!  I, and I alone, can
experience my own mind from the inside.  This
insider knowledge makes me—as communications
specialists are constantly reminding us—the
unchallenged authority on “what I feel” or “what I
think.”  So why is it a lifelong project for me  to
gain insight into my own  thoughts, habits, impulses,
reasons for acting, or the nature of the mind itself?
This is called the “problem of self-opacity,” and
we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it: It was also
of great interest to the medieval thinker Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274), whose theory of self-
knowledge is documented in my new book Aquinas
on Human Self-Knowledge.  It’s a common
scholarly myth that early modern philosophers
(starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the
human being as a “self” or “subject.”  My book tries
to dispel that myth, showing that like philosophers
and neuroscientists today, medieval thinkers were
just as curious about why the mind is so intimately
familiar, and yet so inaccessible, to itself.  (In fact,
long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic
thinkers were speculating about a subconscious,
inaccessible realm in the mind.)  The more we study
the medieval period, the clearer it becomes that
inquiry into the self does not start with Descartes’ “I
think, therefore I am.”  Rather, Descartes was
taking sides in a debate about self-knowledge that
had already begun in the thirteenth century and
earlier.
For Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as
isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents
interacting with our environment.
Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from
the claim that all our self-knowledge is dependent
on our experience of the world around us.  He
rejects a view that was popular at the time, i.e., that
the mind is “always on,” never sleeping,
subconsciously self-aware in the background. 
Instead, Aquinas argues, our awareness of ourselves
is triggered and shaped by our experiences
of objects in our environment.   He pictures the
mind as as a sort of undetermined mental “putty”
that takes shape when it is activated in knowing
something.  By itself, the mind is dark and formless;
but in the moment of acting, it is “lit up” to itself
from the inside and sees itself engaged in that act. 
In other words, when I long for a cup of mid-
afternoon coffee, I’m not just aware of the coffee,
but of myself as the one wanting it.  So for Aquinas,
we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or
selves, but rather always as agents interacting with
our environment.  That’s why the labels we apply to
ourselves—“a gardener,” “a patient person,” or “a
coffee-lover”—are always taken from what we do
or feel or think toward other things.
But if we “see” ourselves from the inside at the
moment of acting, what about the “problem of self-
opacity” mentioned above?  Instead of lacking self-
knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to “see”
everything about ourselves clearly?  Aquinas’s
answer is that just because we experience
something doesn’t mean we instantly understand
everything about it—or to use his terminology:
experiencing that something exists doesn’t tell
us what it is. (By comparison: If someday I
encounter a wallaby, that won’t make me an expert
about wallabies.)  Learning about a thing’s nature
requires a long process of gathering evidence and
drawing conclusions, and even then we may never
fully understand it.  The same applies to the mind.  I
am absolutely certain, with an insider’s perspective
that no one else can have, of the reality of my
experience of wanting another cup of coffee.  But
the significance of those experiences—what they
are, what they tell me about myself and the nature
of the mind—requires further experience and
reasoning.  Am I hooked on caffeine?  What is a
“desire” and why do we have desires?  These
questions can only be answered by reasoning about
the evidence taken from many experiences.
Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not
drawn to search online for answers to the question,
“Who am I?”  That question can only be answered
“from the inside” by me, the one asking the
question.  At the same time, answering this question
isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and
turning in on ourselves.  It’s a matter of becoming
more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging
with reality, and drawing conclusions about what
our activities towards other things “say” about us. 
There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense
of self.

Rene Descartes’s
David Hume’s
The Uncertainty of Causation
Hume observes that while we may perceive
two events that seem to occur in conjunction,
there is no way for us to know the nature of
their connection. Based on this observation,
Hume argues against the very concept of
causation, or cause and effect. We often
assume that one thing causes another, but it is
just as possible that one thing does not cause
the other. Hume claims that causation is a
habit of association, a belief that is unfounded
and meaningless. Still, he notes that when we
repeatedly observe one event following
another, our assumption that we are witnessing
cause and effect seems logical to us. Hume
holds that we have an instinctive belief in
causality, rooted in our own biological habits,
and that we can neither prove nor discount this
belief. However, if we accept our limitations,
we can still function without abandoning our
assumptions about cause and effect. Religion
suggests that the world operates on cause and
effect and that there must therefore be a First
Cause, namely God. In Hume’s worldview,
causation is assumed but ultimately
unknowable. We do not know there is a First
Cause, or a place for God.
The Problem of Induction
Induction is the practice of drawing general
conclusions based on particular experiences.
Although this method is essential to empiricism
and the scientific method, there is always
something inherently uncertain about it,
because we may acquire new data that are
different and that disprove our previous
conclusions. Essentially, the principle of
induction teaches us that we can predict the
future based on what has happened in the
past, which we cannot. Hume argues that in
the absence of real knowledge of the nature of
the connection between events, we cannot
adequately justify inductive assumptions.
Hume suggests two possible justifications and
rejects them both. The first justification is
functional: It is only logical that the future must
resemble the past. Hume pointed out that we
can just as easily imagine a world of chaos, so
logic cannot guarantee our inductions. The
second justification is that we can assume that
something will continue to happen because it
has always happened before. To Hume, this
kind of reasoning is circular and lacks a
foundation in reason. Despite the efforts of
John Stuart Mill and others, some might argue
that the problem of induction has never been
adequately resolved. Hume left the discussion
with the opinion that we have an instinctual
belief in induction, rooted in our own biological
habits, that we cannot shake and yet cannot
prove. Hume allows that we can still use
induction, like causation, to function on a daily
basis as long as we recognize the limitations of
our knowledge.
Religious Morality Versus Moral Utility
Hume proposes the idea that moral principles
are rooted in their utility, or usefulness, rather
than in God’s will. His version of this theory is
unique. Unlike his Utilitarian successors, such
as John Stuart Mill, Hume did not think that
moral truths could be arrived at scientifically,
as if we could add together units of utility and
compare the relative utility of various actions.
Instead, Hume was a moral sentimentalist who
believed that moral principles cannot be
intellectually justified as scientific solutions to
social problems. Hume argues that some
principles simply appeal to us and others do
not. Moral principles appeal to us because they
promote our interests and those of our fellow
human beings, with whom we naturally
sympathize. In other words, humans are
biologically inclined to approve and support
whatever helps society, since we all live in a
community and stand to benefit. Hume used
this simple but controversial insight to explain
how we evaluate a wide array of phenomena,
from social institutions and government policies
to character traits and individual behavior.
The Division of Reason and Morality
Hume denies that reason plays a determining
role in motivating or discouraging behavior.
Instead, he believes that the determining factor
in human behavior is passion. As proof, he
asks us to evaluate human actions according
to the criterion of “instrumentalism”—that is,
whether an action serves the agent’s purpose.
Generally, we see that they do not and that
human beings tend to act out of some other
motivation than their best interest. Based on
these arguments, Hume concludes that reason
alone cannot motivate anyone to act. Rather,
reason helps us arrive at judgments, but our
own desires motivate us to act on or ignore
those judgments. Therefore, reason does not
form the basis of morality—it plays the role of
an advisor rather than that of a decision-maker.
Likewise, immorality is immoral not because it
violates reason but because it is displeasing to
us. This argument angered English clergy and
other religious philosophers who believed that
God gave humans reason to use as a tool to
discover and understand moral principles. By
removing reason from its throne, Hume denied
God’s role as the source of morality.
Finding God in an Orderly Universe
Hume argues that an orderly universe does not
necessarily prove the existence of God. Those
who hold the opposing view claim that God is
the creator of the universe and the source of
the order and purpose we observe in it, which
resemble the order and purpose we ourselves
create. Therefore, God, as creator of the
universe, must possess intelligence similar,
though superior, to ours. Hume explains that
for this argument to hold up, it must be true
that order and purpose appear only as a direct
result of design. He points out that we can
observe order in many mindless processes,
such as generation and vegetation. Hume
further argues that even if we accept that the
universe has a design, we cannot know
anything about the designer. God could be
morally ambiguous, unintelligent, or even
mortal. The design argument does not prove
the existence of God in the way we conceive
him: all-knowing, all-powerful, and entirely
beneficent. The existence of evil, Hume holds,
proves that if God exists, God cannot fit these
criteria. The presence of evil suggests God is
either all-powerful but not completely good or
he is well-meaning but unable to destroy evil,
and so not all-powerful.

The Bundle Theory of the Self

Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us
our concept of self. We tend to think of ourselves as
selves—stable entities that exist over time. But no
matter how closely we examine our own
experiences, we never observe anything beyond a
series of transient feelings, sensations, and
impressions. We cannot observe ourselves, or what
we are, in a unified way. There is no impression of
the “self” that ties our particular impressions
together. In other words, we can never be directly
aware of ourselves, only of what we are
experiencing at any given moment. Although the
relations between our ideas, feelings, and so on,
may be traced through time by memory, there is no
real evidence of any core that connects them. This
argument also applies to the concept of the soul.
Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of
perceptions, like links in a chain. To look for a
unifying self beyond those perceptions is like
looking for a chain apart from the links that
constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of the
self is a result of our natural habit of attributing
unified existence to any collection of associated
parts. This belief is natural, but there is no logical
support for it.
Immanuel Kant’s
Gilbert Ryle’s
Gilbert Ryle
First published Tue Dec 18, 2007; substantive
revision Wed Feb 4, 2015
Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of
topics in philosophy (notably in the history of
philosophy and in philosophy of language),
including a series of lectures centred on
philosophical dilemmas, a series of articles on the
concept of thinking, and a book on Plato, The
Concept of Mind remains his best known and most
important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought
to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was
seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of
Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself
anticipated, he is thought to have argued on behalf
of, and suggested as dualism's replacement, the
doctrine known as philosophical (and
sometimes analytical) behaviourism. Sometimes
known as an “ordinary language”, sometimes as an
“analytic” philosopher, Ryle—even when
mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and
his followers—is considered to be on a different,
somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to
characterise), philosophical track.
Philosophical behaviourism has long been rejected;
what was worth keeping has been appropriated by
the philosophical doctrine of functionalism, which
is the most widely accepted view in philosophy of
mind today. It is a view that is thought to have
saved the “reality” of the mental from the
“eliminativist” or “fictionalist” tendencies of
behaviourism while acknowledging the insight
(often attributed to Ryle) that the mental is
importantly related to behavioural output or
response (as well as to stimulus or input).
According to a reasonably charitable assessment,
the best of Ryle's lessons has long been assimilated
while the problematic has been discarded. If there
are considerations still brewing from the 1930s and
40s that would threaten the orthodoxy in
contemporary philosophy of mind, these lie
somewhere in work of Wittgenstein and his
followers—not in Ryle.
But the view just outlined, though widespread,
represents a fundamental misapprehension of Ryle's
work. First, Cartesianism is dead in only one of its
ontological aspects: substance dualism may well
have been repudiated but property dualism still
claims a number of contemporary defenders. The
problem of finding a place for the mental in the
physical world, of accommodating the causal power
of the mental, and of accounting for the phenomenal
aspects of consciousness are all live problems in the
philosophy of mind today because they share some
of the doctrine's ontological, epistemological, and
semantic assumptions.
Second, and importantly, Ryle is not a philosophical
behaviourist—at least he does not subscribe to any
of the main tenets associated with that doctrine as it
is known today. One may be confused by this if one
is also confused about Ryle's conception of
philosophy. Although there is some truth in
identifying him as an analytic philosopher—he
announces (1932, 61) that “the sole and whole
function of philosophy” is philosophical analysis—
this is likely to be misunderstood today if one thinks
that the proper goal of philosophy (attainable if not
in practice at least in ideals) is definitional analysis.
It is this that encourages the association with
behaviourism (in at least one of its many senses).
But Ryle was not an analytical philosopher in this
sense. True, Ryle acknowledges the influence of
Moore's emphasis on common sense (and thus on
ordinary language); true, he takes himself to be
pursuing the type of philosophical investigation
(exemplified by Russell's Theory of Descriptions)
that involves uncovering the logical form of
grammatically misleading expressions. But it is
important to take account of the differences that
separate Ryle from the early Moore and Russell for
it is their conception of philosophy that has been
inherited by many of us working within the
“analytic” tradition in philosophy today. That is the
third point. For Ryle does not believe
in meanings (concepts or propositions) as these
have been traditionally construed (as stable objects
or rules, the grasp of which is logically prior to, and
thus may be used to explain, the use of
expressions). Indeed, Ryle's conception of
philosophy was not fundamentally different from
that of Wittgenstein. Ryle sets out in print as early
as 1932 a philosophical agenda that prefigures the
published work of the later Wittgenstein; the
“elasticity of significance” and “inflections of
meaning” Ryle finds in most expressions appear to
be the family of structures, more or less related,
noticed by Wittgenstein; and Ryle's attack on the
“intellectualist legend” shares Wittgenstein's
concern to understand a proper—non-exalted—
place for rules in an explanation of various
philosophically interesting achievements. In spite of
the fact that some of Wittgenstein's protégés were
dismissive of Ryle's work,[1] the best way to
understand Ryle is to see him, if not as following in
Wittgenstein's footsteps, then as walking some
stretches of philosophical terrain down a parallel
path.
1. Biography
Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, Sussex, England
on 19 August 1900. One of ten children, he came
from a prosperous family and enjoyed a liberal and
stimulating childhood and adolescence. His father
was a general practitioner but had keen interests in
philosophy and astronomy that he passed on to his
children and an impressive library where Ryle
enjoyed being an “omnivorous reader” (Ryle, 1970,
1). Educated at Brighton College (where later in life
he would return as a governor) Ryle went to
Queen's College, Oxford in 1919 initially to study
Classics, but he was quickly drawn to Philosophy,
graduating in 1924 with first-class honours in the
new Modern Greats School of Philosophy, Politics
and Economics. While not particularly sporting, his
undergraduate studies were relieved by rowing for
his college eight, of which he was captain, and he
was good enough to have trials for the University
boat. After his graduation in 1924 he was appointed
to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church
College and a year later became tutor. He would
remain at Oxford for his entire academic career
until his retirement in 1968; in 1945 he was elected
to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy.
With the outbreak of war Ryle volunteered. He was
commissioned in the Welsh Guards, serving in
intelligence, and by the end of the War had been
promoted to the rank of Major. He became the
Editor of Mind after G.E. Moore's retirement in
1947; a post he held until 1971. Ryle was unstinting
in his advice and encouragement to generations of
students. With colleagues he was “tolerant (and)
uncensorious” (Warnock, xiv), but in philosophical
debate he could turn into a formidable opponent,
expressing an intense dislike of pomposity, pretence
and jargon (Urmson, 271; Gallop, 228). He was also
ever ready to challenge both the excessive
veneration paid by others to Plato and Classical
authors as well as the philosophical positions held
by such contemporary colleagues as Collingwood in
Oxford or Anderson in Australia. He befriended
Wittgenstein whose work, if not his effect on
colleagues and students, he greatly admired.
“Outstandingly friendly (and) sociable” (Warnock,
xiv), he is remembered as an entertaining
conversationalist. Despite having turned away from
literary studies during his first year at Oxford,
sensing he had little aptitude for them, and even
though he read little other than the novels of Jane
Austen (about whom he wrote authoritatively) and
P. G. Wodehouse, the style of Ryle's writing is
often literary and instantly recognizable even after a
few sentences (Urmson, 271; Mabbott, 223). A
confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement
with his twin sister Mary in the Oxfordshire village
of Islip. Gardening and walking gave him immense
pleasure, as did his pipe. He died on 6 October 1976
at Whitby in Yorkshire after a day's walking on the
moors. “Philosophy irradiated his whole life”
(Mabbott, 224). He is reputed to have said that the
only completed portrait of him made him look like a
“drowned German General” (Mabbott, 224).
2. Philosophy as Cartography
When Ryle became a young don in the 1920s,
philosophers could no longer “pretend that
philosophy differed from physics, chemistry and
biology by studying mental as opposed to material
phenomena” (1971b, vii). Although the turn away
from psychologism was laudable, philosophers
succumbed instead to what Ryle considered to be a
regrettable temptation to look for Objects which
were neither mental nor material. Such objects were
to be for philosophy what beetles and butterflies are
for entomology:
Platonic Forms, Propositions, Intentional Objects,
Logical Objects…[and even] Sense Data were
recruited to appease our professional hankerings
to have a subject matter of our own (1971b, vii).
Ryle's campaign against the tendency of
philosophers to “hypostasise their own terms of art”
lasted throughout his career. Even his very first
articles carried the “Occamizing” message that
“[p]hilosophical problems are problems of a certain
sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about
special entities” (1971b, vii; these early articles
include 1929, 1930, 1933a, and 1933b).
Instead, think of a philosopher, by analogy, as a
cartographer. According to Ryle, competent
speakers of language are to a philosopher what an
ordinary villager is to a mapmaker. A local villager
knows his way by wont and without reflection to
the village church, to the town hall, to the shops and
back home again from the personal point of view of
one who lives there. But, asked to draw or to
consult a map of his village, he is faced with
learning a new and different sort of task: one that
employs compass bearing and units of
measurement. What was first understood in the
personal terms of local snapshots now has to be
considered in the completely general terms of the
cartographer. The villager's knowledge by wont,
enabling him to lead a stranger from place to place,
is a different skill from one requiring him to tell the
stranger, in perfectly general and neutral terms, how
to get to any of the places, or indeed, how to
understand these places in relation to those of other
villages (1962a, 441).
We are like the villager with respect to our
employment of words and phrases. Knowledge by
wont of the use of expressions and of concrete ideas
is something everybody learns in the course of
growing up speaking and understanding a language:
“their ‘logical geography’ is taught by one's daily
walks” (1945, 207). So too do people know how to
operate with ordinary, non-technical, and even
semi-technical and technical expressions as well as
with relatively concrete and some abstract ideas
without being able to codify the rules, permissions,
or sanctions that govern their operations.
Now, almost every word or phrase we use
contributes to what we say in a way such that had it
been replaced by a word or phrase with a different
significance, it would have had different
“implication threads”:
It would have been a different statement, different
in having different implications, in requiring
different tests for truth or falsehood, in being
compatible and incompatible with different
affiliated statements, in being evidence for or
against different corollaries, and so on. (1962a,
442-3)
To the extent that I understand what I am saying, I
understand the particular differences that the
expression contributes to the statements, questions,
commands, etc. that I make with it. In making
everyday (non-philosophical) statements, or in
asking ordinary factual questions, or in giving
concrete, practical advice I am like, Ryle says, the
villager who simply walks to his destination without
having to think about what he is doing or turning
back in his tracks. But even in making everyday,
non-philosophical statements, I employ a plurality
of expressions. The implication threads of some of
these expressions may “pull against” the implication
threads of others. For example,
…I might truly and intelligibly describe a weary
sailor in a storm as having toiled voluntarily,
although reluctantly; and then I find myself in a
perplexity. For I seem to be saying that he toiled
not under compulsion but because he volunteered
to do it, despite the fact that he did not want to do
it. The natural implication threads of ‘voluntarily’
seem to pull away from the natural implication
threads of ‘reluctantly’. (1962a, 443)
To resolve this complexity it is not enough that I be
familiar with the separate contributions of the two
adverbs. To resolve it, I need to be satisfied that the
conflict is only apparent. I am confronted with a
conceptual problem that requires that I be able
to say how the implication threads of the one bear
on the implication threads of the other. This
requires abstracting from or ignoring the particular
reference to this sailor or that storm; it requires that
I operate upon general notions of actions, motive,
preference, strength of desires, choice and so on.
The most philosophically interesting questions arise
for those cases of conflict that present themselves
again and again. We speak in the same breath of a
responsible human agent who is, and acts, in a
world that is a field of physical, chemical, and
biological causes and effects. “Men must, we feel,
be free; yet they must, we feel, be amenable to
prediction and explanation. Their actions cannot be
mechanical. Yet also they cannot be unmechanical”
(1962a, 444). From the point of view of laymen and
scientists who are actually exploring the world, we
find out what there is by perceiving it; yet from the
point of view of the inquirer into the mechanism of
perception, what we perceive never coincides with
the world (1954, 2). The reconciliation of these
convictions, an answer to the question how this
could be, belongs to philosophy.
We have now to operate upon what we ordinarily
operate readily and unquestioningly with. We now
need the theory of our daily practice, the
geography of our daily walks. When two or twenty
familiar implication threads seem to pull across and
against one another, it is no longer enough to be
able unperplexedly to follow along each one by
itself. We need to be able to state their directions,
their limits and their interlockings; to think
systematically about what normally we merely
think competently with. (1962a, 444)
3. Systematic Ambiguity and Type Trespasses
Ryle's concern in much of his work was not simply
the charting of the logical bearings of ideas. It was
rather to apply this method as a way of testing (and
often destroying) philosophical theories themselves.
When we put on our philosophical hats and begin to
operate not only upon concrete ideas, but abstract
ideas or abstractions, we tend to get into trouble.
Not only is it the case that every word or phrase we
use contributes to what we say in a way such that
had it been replaced by a word or phrase with a
different significance, it would have had different
implication threads; had we used the same word or
phrase in a different context what we would have
said is also likely to have had a different
significance with different implication threads.
A given word will, in different sorts of context,
express ideas of an indefinite range of differing
logical types and, therefore, with different logical
powers. And what is true of single words is also
true of complex expressions and of grammatical
constructions. (1945, 206)
Thus, even if we were to put aside ambiguity of the
kind that logicians ignore (Ryle calls such
expressions “pun words”), we are faced with
another sort of elasticity of significance which
characterizes the use, according to Ryle, “not of a
few but of most or of all expressions…”(1945, 205).
Unlike ambiguous words such as ‘bank’ or ‘report’
or ‘stud’, the inflections of meaning to which most
of our expressions are susceptible nonetheless have
affinities: the ideas expressed by these expressions
in their various uses are “intimately connected”
with each other; they are “different inflections of
the same root” (1945, 206). The paraphrases and
translations of these expressions will normally have
“a precisely similar” flexibility. This means that if
we were to paraphrase the expression as it is used in
one context in order to make clear its implication
threads in that context, we can expect the
paraphrase, like the original expression, to express a
different idea in a different context. To use a
contemporary idiom, the paraphrase, like the
original expression, is “context-sensitive”.
The philosophical task Ryle recommends involves
tracing the inflections of significance that are
conveyed by expressions with a common root in
their various uses. On this way of looking at it, it is
not wrong to say that the philosopher studies or
investigates the idea or the concept of, say, justice.
But putting it this way may be misleading if it
obscures the fact that the logical force of the
relevant words (‘is just’) may change with the
context in which it is used. Again, Ryle thought this
to be so for most single words and complex
expressions and not only the ambiguous “pun-
words”. Indeed, “[u]nnoticed systematic
ambiguities are a common source of type-
confusions and philosophic problems” (1945, 207).
Systematic ambiguity affects not only single words
and complex expressions. It affects grammatical
constructions as well. Since expressions of the same
grammatical constructions function to express
thoughts of multifarious logical sorts, those starting
to philosophise (those operating upon ideas and not
merely with them) “tend to be blind to the fact that
different ideas have different logical powers…”
(1945, 200). Assimilation of the functions or uses
can lead to trouble, and this can be shown by
eliciting contradictions, absurdities, and paradoxes.
The inevitable consequence is that naïve
intellectual operations with those ideas lead
directly to logically intolerable results. Concepts of
different types cannot be coerced into similar
logical conduct. Some sort of contradiction arises
from the attempt and this, in fortunate cases,
compels the thinker to turn back in his tracks and
try to change his treatment of the outraged
concept. (1945, 201)[2]
4. Concepts, Propositions, and Meaning
The implications of this view for the concept of
meaning or for nominalisations of the verb ‘to
mean’ are important. We are not at all likely to be
misled by expressions of the form ‘x means
what y means.’ But when we use the expression
quasi-descriptively, as in ‘The meaning of x is the
same as the meaning of y’ or ‘The meaning of x is
doubtful’ we are liable to be misled into thinking
that we are referring to some queer new object. Ryle
generalises the point to suggest that all the mistaken
doctrines of concepts, ideas, terms, judgment,
contents, and the like derive from the fallacy
that there must be something referred to by such
expressions as ‘the meaning of the word (phrase or
sentence) x’ [which is analogous to the policeman]
who is referred to by the descriptive phrase ‘Our
village policeman is fond of football’. (1932, 56)
The meaning of an expression is not an entity
denoted by it and not the nominee of any thing. It
would be a related mistake to suppose, Ryle tells us,
that a particular concept is precisely indicated by a
particular expression: as if the idea of equality could
be identified as that for which the word ‘equality’
stands (1945, 206). For Ryle, agreeing here with
Wittgenstein, “concepts are not things that are there
crystallised in a splendid isolation”; rather
they are discriminable features, but not detachable
atoms, of what is integrally said or integrally
thought. They are not detachable parts of, but
distinguishable contributions to, the unitary senses
of complete sentences. To examine them is to
examine the live force of things that we actually
say. It is to examine them not in retirement, but
doing their co-operative work. (1962b, 185) [3]
The idea that expressions have meaning insofar as
they stand for things should be rejected. Indeed,
some expressions denote (in one of a variety of
ways) because they are significant. To learn the
meaning of an expression is to learn to operate
correctly with it; more like learning a piece of drill
than like coming across a previously unencountered
object (1957, 365).
Concepts are instead to be understood as that which
is conveyed by a word or phrase independently of
the language (English or French) in which the word
is written or spoken. Although we tend to make use
of abstract nouns to talk about that which is
conveyed by various words, this should not mislead
us. Russell and Moore may have described their
pursuits as the investigation of supra-mundane
entities, but this was not, claims Ryle, the way they
or any other philosopher set about their task.
Aristotle, for example, when studying Plato's
account of Pleasure, did not “stare hard” at an entity
or Essence designated by this abstract noun:
“Instead he rightly considered what we are asserting
or denying in concreto when we say that someone
did or did not enjoy the concert; or that someone
enjoys this piece of music more than that piece”
(1962b, 185). Unlike the abstract noun “Pleasure”,
the live verb is making specific contributions to
sense. Similarly, an analysis of the concept, say,
of existence “cannot consist just in acts of
contemplating a rarefied object, withdrawn, like a
coin in a museum, from its native commercial
transactions” (1962b, 185).
5. Ordinary Language
Ryle is often described as an ordinary language
philosopher or as recommending that philosophy
should concern itself with the ordinary use of
language. In a certain sense this is apt; in another it
is not.
Philosophers may well study the stock use of
various expressions. But these may be highly
technical or semi-technical expressions, as well as
vernacular ones. Berkeley, for example, in
examining the stock (and possibly the only) use of
‘infinitesimals’, was examining the way in which
this word was employed by mathematicians.
Philosophers of law, biology, mathematics, formal
logic, theology, psychological and grammar are all
required to examine technical terms or concepts. So
if ‘ordinary’ is contrasted with ‘technical’ or
‘specialised’ then some philosophy is and some
philosophy is not concerned with ordinary language
(1953, 304).
But one reason it may be true that philosophy
should be couched in vernacular terms has to do
with philosophy's special task. Just as the
cartographer was required to use a different, more
general vocabulary to plot the geography of the
local village, so too should the philosopher use a
more general vocabulary than the specialist's to plot
the “cross-bearings” between the concepts of
different theories. The tangles and knots that a
philosopher has to unpick are set not by some
branch of specialist theory, but “in the thought and
the discourse of everyone, specialists and non-
specialists alike” (1953, 304).
Talk about the use of an expression, like the use of
safety-pins and table-knives, helps us to avoid
thinking that we are talking about any queer
relations or queer entities; to suppose or half-
suppose that “studying the meaning of the phrase
‘the solar system’ [is]… the same thing as studying
the solar system” (1953, 306). It reminds us, for
example, that when enquiring into the problems of
perception or in discussing the concepts of seeing,
hearing, and smelling, we are not tackling the
questions of opticians, neuro-physiologists or
psychologists. We are rather after accounts of how
certain words work, “namely words like ‘see’,
‘look’, ‘overlook’, ‘blind’, ‘visualise’, and lots of
other affiliated expressions” (1953, 317).
A philosopher of Ryle's ilk is interested in the
informal logic of the employment of expressions;
the nature of the logical force that expressions have
as components of theories and as pivots of concrete
arguments. That is why, he says, in our discussions
we argue with expressions and about those
expressions in one and the same breath. We are
trying to register what we are exhibiting; to codify
the very logical codes which we are then and there
observing (1953, 318).
Often the appeal to what we do and do not say, or
can or cannot say is resisted, Ryle says, by those
who hold that philosophical disputes can be settled
by formalising the warring theses, or translating
them out of the natural language in which they were
originally constructed into the notation, perhaps, of
a Principia Mathematica. As we should expect from
a philosopher who sees his job as the plotting of the
logical force of expressions as they appear in
different contexts, Ryle describes as a “formaliser's
dream” the conviction that the investigation can be
regularised in such a way as to replace what was
philosophically puzzling by logical problems
amenable to known and teachable procedures of
calculation. Indeed, he denies not only that the logic
of everyday statements but even the logic of the
statements of scientists, lawyers, historians and
bridge-players can in principle be adequately
represented by the formulae of formal logic.
Of course, he concedes, the logical behaviour of the
terms of non-notational discourse may be assisted
by studies in formal logic; so may chess-playing
assist generals. But waging a campaign can no more
be replaced by playing games of chess than the
study of the logical behaviour of the terms of non-
notational discourse can be replaced by doing
formal logic. Thus in the slogan ‘Back to ordinary
language’, ‘ordinary’ may be contrasted with
‘notional’. The slogan can then be used by those
who have awoken from the formaliser's dream. So
used, he says, it should be repudiated only by those
who hope to replace philosophising by reckoning
(1953, 316-7).
6. The Official Doctrine and its contemporary
offshoots
Ryle's writings on the question of what constitutes a
philosophical problem, and of the way to solve it,
occupied him in the 1920s and 30s. The Concept of
Mind was written after this “long spell of
methodological talk”: what was needed was “an
example of the method really working” (1970, 12).
Although entitled The Concept of Mind, the book,
Ryle tells us, is
an examination of multifarious specific mental
concepts, such as those of knowing, learning,
discovering, imagining, pretending, hoping,
wanting, feeling depressed, feeling a pain,
resolving, doing voluntarily, doing deliberately,
perceiving, remembering and so on. (1962b, 188)
As the analogy of philosophy with cartography
suggests, Ryle investigates the workings not just of
one concept by itself, but “all of the threads of a
spider's web of inter-working concepts” (1962b,
189).
The book focuses on the “type-errors” or “category
mistakes” which philosophers of mind are prone to
make when they consider the logical form of
“mental conduct verbs”, especially if they use as
their starting-point the “Janus-faced account of
human life” suggested by a Cartesian conception of
the mind.
Ryle's explicit target in The Concept of Mind is
what he calls the “Official Doctrine”, which results,
he tells us, at least in part from Descartes'
appreciation that Galilean methods of scientific
discovery were fit to provide mechanical
explanations for every occupant of space, together
with Descartes' conviction that the mental could not
simply be a more complex variety of the
mechanical. This “two-world”, Cartesian view has
distinctive ontological, epistemological, and
semantic commitments that each lead to particular
philosophical puzzles.
6.1 The ontological commitment
The ontological commitment of the view is that
there are two different kinds of things, body and
mind, that are somehow harnessed together. The
one exists in space and is subject to mechanical or
physical laws; the other is not in space and is not
subject to these laws. And yet the mind and body
influence each other. The view that mind and body
are somehow fundamentally different or distinct,
but nonetheless interact, leads to the philosophical
conundrum known as the mind-body problem. For
contemporary philosophers of mind, the mind-body
problem no longer involves construing the mind as
an independent substance. But working out the
relation between mental and
physical properties remains an urgent project (Kim,
2). [4]
In contemporary philosophy of mind, Ryle is
credited with having established an important
connection between mental predicates and
behaviour; but many of his successors (Place,
Armstrong, Putnam, and Fodor) thought he
misconstrued the nature of that connection. When
strict physicalist positions were beset by objections
from the multiple realisability of mental predicates,
“token-physicalist” versions of functionalism (or
“ontic-neutral” versions of the causal theory of
mind) stepped up to the plate, and advertised that, in
acknowledging behavioural outputs as well as
stimulus conditions, they were retaining what was
right about Ryle's emphasis on behaviour (in the
circumstances), but rejecting what they considered
the “explanatory vacuity” of conceptual or
definitional links between mental predicates and
behavioural ones. These were replaced with causal
links between the alleged referents of the mental
terms and the action to be explained.
But to suppose the explanatory power of mental
conduct terms depends on their designating an event
or state that is causally related to the performance is
to accept another version of the “paramechanical”
hypothesis, even though it is now couched in ontic-
neutral or physicalist terms.[5]
Although Ryle's own target is the attempt to staple
an elusive mental event construed as a conscious
“experience” onto a respectable biological
(muscular, neurophysiological) causal chain, it is
nevertheless clear that the problems he sees will
also apply to modern-day variations on the dualist
theme. That is, it will also apply to weak, non-
reductive identity theories that wish to preserve a
causal role for mental properties. For consider:
The episodes supposed to constitute the careers of
mind have one sort of existence, while those
constituting the careers of bodies have another
sort; and no bridge-status is involved…Minds, as
the whole legend describes them, are what must
exist if there is to be a causal explanation of the
intelligent behaviour of human bodies; and minds,
as the theory describes them, live on a floor of
existence defined as being outside the causal
system to which bodies belong. (1949a, 65)
It would be difficult to find a better anticipation of
the mind-body problem as we know it today. The
problem of mental causation may not be exactly the
same as Descartes' problem, but it is nonetheless
inherited by anyone who insists that mental
properties must, on the one hand, make a causal
difference and by those who, on the other, think that
physics is a closed causal system. Just as mind-body
interaction was a problem for substance dualism, so
is mental causation still the problem facing the
many varieties of (both reductive and non-
reductive) physicalism (Kim, 29-30).
It seems then that the two ontological aspects of the
Official Doctrine—finding a place for the mental in
the physical world and the problem of mental
causation—still survive today.
6.2 The epistemological and semantic
commitments
The ontological commitments of the Official
Doctrine lead to the mind-body problem; the
epistemological commitments of the Official
Doctrine lead to the problem of other minds.
According to the traditional view, bodily processes
are external and can be witnessed by observers, but
mental processes are private, “internal” as it is
metaphorically described (since mental processes
are not supposed to be locatable anywhere). Mental
processes or events are supposed, on the official
view, to be played out in a private theatre; such
events are known directly by the person who has
them either through the faculty of introspection or
the “phosphorescence” of consciousness. The
subject of the mental states is, on this view,
incorrigible—her avowals of her own mental states
cannot be corrected by others—and she is infallible
—she cannot be wrong about which states she is in.
[6]
 Others can know them only indirectly through
“complex and frail inferences” from what the body
does.
But if all that is mental is to be understood in this
way, it is unclear how we are justified in believing
that others have the requisite episodes or mental
accompaniments. It would be possible, on this view,
for others to act as if they are minded, but for them
to have none of the right “conscious experiences”
accompanying their actions for them to qualify as
such. Perhaps we are in much the same position as
Descartes who thought it made sense to wonder
whether such creatures are automata instead.
The problem of other minds is compounded by even
more serious difficulties given certain assumptions
about the way language works. Proponents of the
Official Doctrine are committed to the view that
mental discourse serves to designate items that
carry the metaphysical and epistemological load of
that doctrine.
The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in
ordinary life we describe the wits, characters and
higher-grade performances of the people with
whom we have do, are required to be construed as
signifying special episodes in their secret histories,
or else as signifying tendencies for such episodes to
occur. (1949a, 16-17)
Ryle's criticism of the Official Doctrine begins by
pointing out an absurdity in its semantic
consequences. If mental conduct verbs pick out
“occult” causes then we would not be able to apply
those verbs as we do; so something must be wrong
with a theory of mental phenomena that renders so
inadequate our everyday use of these verbs. For,
according to the Official Doctrine
when someone is described as knowing, believing
or guessing something, as hoping, dreading,
intending or shirking something, as designing this
or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed
to denote the occurrence of specific modifications
in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. (1945,
17)
Ryle's criticism of the view is that if it were correct,
only privileged access to this stream of
consciousness could provide authentic testimony
that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or
incorrectly applied. “The onlooker, be he teacher,
critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself
that his comments have any vestige of truth.” And
yet,
it was just because we do in fact all know how to
make such comments, make them with general
correctness and correct them when they turn out
to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers
found it necessary to construct their theories of the
nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct
concepts being regularly and effectively used, they
properly sought to fix their logical geography. But
the account officially recommended would entail
that there could be no regular or effective use of
these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions
of, and prescriptions for, other people's minds.
(1949a, 17)
Ryle is often given credit for having shown some of
the many difficulties in substance or Cartesian
dualism. But the arguments in The Concept of
Mind warn of difficulties for any account that takes
mental conduct terms to discharge their explanatory
role by signifying inner processes: whether
irreducibly mental or at bottom physical. Ryle's
target was not merely the ghostliness of the mental
processes hypothesized by the Cartesian; it was
their essential hidden-ness. The thrust of Ryle's
polemic is that theories about the nature of the
alleged referents of the mental concepts we employ
in our ordinary everyday commonsense practices
cannot make a mystery of this employment without
threatening to rob the theories of their subject
matter. Our practice of employing such mental
concepts would be a complete mystery on a view
that takes the “truth-makers” of our mental
statements to be not only items within an occult (to
others) stream of consciousness, but also on a view
that takes them to be items within an occult (to most
of us) series of computations or neurological events.
Both picture the truth-makers of our claims about
other minds or our ascriptions of mental predicates
as hidden and thus in practice (if not in principle) as
inaccessible.
7. The Intellectualist Legend
To highlight the general difficulties with
Cartesianism is only part of Ryle's destructive
strategy. The other part is to show how logical
absurdities arise with one particular offshoot of the
Official Doctrine: one he dubs “the intellectualist
legend”. This involves the type-error or category
mistake of supposing that what distinguishes certain
performances from others that are perceptually
similar (in one sense of ‘perceptual’) is the addition
of some non-perceptual feature. The Official
Doctrine construes this feature as a special mental
accompaniment.[7] The intellectualist legend,
accepting this construal of the Official Doctrine,
says that intelligent or rational behaviour can be
accommodated or explained by some sort of
theoretical operations involving these hidden
accompaniments. But if this is a mistake, it is a big
one; for it is made not only throughout various sub-
branches of philosophy but also in collaborating
disciplines. (The idea, for example, that intelligence
involves physically realised, (non-introspectible)
theoretical (computational) operations is one of the
founding blocks of the cognitive sciences.)
This picture of how rational abilities in general are
to be explained, including the ability to speak a
language, was called into question by Ryle in a
number of early papers (especially in 1946a,
ostensibly reworked as the second chapter of 1949a,
and in 1946b and 1950). It was also called into
question by Wittgenstein in his discussion of rules
(Wittgenstein, §§143-155 and 179-202).
In broad brush-strokes, Ryle's argument-strategy
against the supposition that generally intelligent or
rational abilities can be explained in terms of prior
theoretical operations (involving the apprehension
of the relevant truths) is to exhibit how the
supposition leads to logically vicious regresses.
Intelligent behaviours cannot be explained, in
general, by assuming that theoretical operations
have gone on behind the scene, since those
operations themselves can be intelligent or non-
intelligent. The supposition that intelligent
behaviour always requires prior (or even
contemporaneous) theoretical operations launches a
vicious regress of theoretical operations. Thus, it
must be allowed that some intelligent behaviour is
not the outcome of prior theoretical operations.
The role of the rules, standards, or norms that
govern our practices should neither be exaggerated
nor underestimated. For Ryle (as for Wittgenstein),
rules are codifications or distillations of normative
practices that are already up and running. As Ryle
aptly quips,
[t]here were reasoners before Aristotle and
strategists before Clausewitz. The application of
rules of reasoning and strategy did not have to
await the work of their codifiers. Aristotle and
Clausewitz were, in fact, only able to extract these
rules, because they were already being applied.
(1946b, 233)
The crystallisation of performance-rules in rule-
formulae is, in some cases, a product of studies in
the methodology of the practices in which they have
already been applied and not the condition of their
being applied. In other words: there must be a way
of applying a rule that does not require the prior
consultation of an expression of that rule.
Close attention to the cases in which we credit
someone for her performance shows that it is often
enough for her (merely) to have satisfied certain
criteria or for her performance to have lived up to
the relevant standard. Close attention to the cases in
which we require not only that she satisfy certain
criteria but also that she apply the criteria by using
an expression of a rule to guide her shows that the
latter is in fact a separate skill, which we only
sometimes (but importantly not always) demand of
the one we wish to credit for her performance.[8]
The ability to apply criteria in order to ensure that
one's performance is successful is like showing a
ticket in order to ensure one's right to travel by rail
(1950, 239-40). It would be a category mistake to
imagine that the ticket itself plays a role in the
explanation of the train journey on the same level as
the pistons, levers, and tracks. So, too, would it be a
category mistake to imagine that reasons, for
example, play a role in the explanation of action on
(almost) the same level as the internal processes that
explain (in a different sense) the body's motions; or
that meanings or understandings play a role in the
explanation of language use on (almost) the same
level as the internal processes that explain (again, in
a different sense) vocalisations. But just this type of
category error seems to be made by those who
construe the relevant mental phenomena, including
understanding, as inner causal events.[9]
8. Behaviourism
Ryle's view is standardly characterised as a weaker
or “softer” version of this doctrine (Smith and
Jones, 144). According to this standard
interpretation, Ryle's view is that statements
containing mental terms can be translated, without
loss of meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about
what the individual will do in various
circumstances. So Ryle (on this account) is to be
construed as offering a dispositional analysis of
mental statements into behavioural ones. It is
conceded that Ryle does not confine his
descriptions of what the agent will do (under the
circumstances) to purely physical behaviour—in
terms, say, of skeletal or muscular descriptions—
but is happy to speak of full-bodied actions like
scoring a goal or paying a debt.[10] But the “soft”
behaviourism attributed to Ryle still attempts an
analysis (or translation) of mental statements into a
series of dispositional statements which are
themselves construed as subjunctive conditionals
describing what the agent will do (albeit under the
relevant action description) under various
circumstances. Even this “soft” behaviourism is
bound to fail, however, since mentalistic vocabulary
is not analysable or translatable into behavioural
statements even if these are allowed to include
descriptions of actions. For the list of conditions
and possible behaviour will be infinite since any
one proffered translation can be defeated by slight
alteration of the circumstances; and the defeating
conditions in any particular case may involve a
reference to facts about the agent's mind, thereby
rendering the analysis circular. In sum, the standard
interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering a
somewhat weakened form of reductive
behaviourism whose reductivist ambitions, however
weakened, are nonetheless futile.
But this characterisation of Ryle's programme is
simply wrong. Although it is true that Ryle was
keen to point out the dispositional nature of many
mental concepts, it would be wrong to construe him
as offering a programme of analysis of mental
predicates into a series of subjunctive conditionals.
The relationship between mental predicates and the
“hypothetical” and “semi-hypothetical” sentences
with which we can “unpack” them is other than that
required by this kind of analysis.
It will be helpful to keep in mind that Ryle's target
is the Official Doctrine with its attendant
ontological, epistemological, and semantic
commitments. His arguments serve to remind us
that we have in a large number of cases ways of
telling or settling disputes, for example, about
someone's character or intellect. If you dispute my
characterisation of someone as believing or wanting
something, I will point to what he says and does in
defending my particular attribution (as well as to
features of the circumstances). But our practice of
giving reasons of this kind to defend or to challenge
ascriptions of mental predicates would be put under
substantial pressure if the Official Doctrine were
correct.
For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a matter of
fact, have a way of settling disputes about whether
someone is vain or whether she is in pain is much
weaker than saying that a concept is meaningless
unless it is verifiable; or even that the successful
application of mental predicates requires that we
have a way of settling disputes in all cases. Showing
that a concept is one for which, in a large number of
cases, we have agreement-reaching procedures
(even if these do not always guarantee success)
captures an important point, however: it counts
against any theory, say, of vanity or pain that would
render it unknowable in principle or in
practice whether or not the concept is correctly
applied in every case. And this was precisely the
problem with the Official Doctrine (and is still a
problem, as I suggested earlier, with some of its
contemporary progeny).
Ryle points out in a later essay that there is a form
of dilemma that pits the reductionist against
the duplicationist[11]: those whose battle cry is
“Nothing but…” and those who insist on
“Something else as Well…”. Ryle attempts a
dissolution of these types of dilemma by rejecting
the two horns; not by taking sides with either one,
though part of what dissolution requires in this case,
as in others, is a description of how both sides are to
be commended for seeing what the other side does
not, and criticised for failing to see what the other
side does.
The attraction of behaviourism, he reminds us, is
simply that it does not insist on occult happenings
as the basis upon which all mental terms are given
meaning, and points to the perfectly observable
criteria that are by and large employed when we are
called upon to defend or correct our employment of
these mental terms. The problem with behaviourism
is that it has a too-narrow view both of what counts
as behaviour and of what counts as observable. The
attraction of Cartesianism is that it recognizes in a
way the behaviourist does not that there may be
crucial differences between creatures who—on a
certain restrictive notion of behaviour—do indeed
behave identically. The problem with Cartesianism
is that it attempts to account for these differences by
hypothesizing the existence of occult or hidden
causes.
In an attempt to defeat the Cartesian or Platonist
and remind us that mental predicates have perfectly
ordinary standards of application, Ryle focuses on
what is observable. It is part of his war against what
is not only occult (and observable only through
introspection) but also against what is hidden from
the viewpoint of a third-party observer. But, in
focussing on what is observable, he does not
commit himself to reducing what is observable
itself to sequences of “muscular behaviour”. Those
who attribute to Ryle a “soft” behaviourism are at
least correct that the reminders he issues to ward off
Cartesianism include frank appeal to what he later
will describe as actions much higher up on the
“sophistication ladder” like paying a bill, or scoring
a goal, as well as to what he will later call
“concrete”, “per se”, or “infra” doings like
scribbling numbers on a cheque book or kicking a
ball between two posts.
Surely, as his earlier critics pointed out (and as
those who see him as a behaviourist ignore) some of
the phenomena he allows will reintroduce a realm
of private occurrences (dreams and imaginings will
be the paradigm case). But as Ayer suspects, this
sort of “ghost” is an honest ghost. Not simply (as
Ayer suggests) because the phenomena do not
command the stage of a private theatre: in the sense
that no one else can tell us about them they are in
that respect private.[12] As Ryle himself admits, “the
technical trick of conducting our thinking in
auditory word-images, instead of spoken words,
does indeed secure secrecy for our thinking…”
(1949a, 35).
It is an “honest ghost” since privacy or secrecy of
certain episodes will not lead to privacy for them
all; and thus the epistemological concomitant to the
Official Doctrine that would lead to the problem of
other minds is not a threat. Nor does this sort of
privacy usher in the semantic consequences of the
Official Doctrine. The privacy attending our dreams
and imaginings does not impugn our right to draw
on observable (in the robust sense of the term)
phenomena to defend our right to employ mental
predicates for a large number of cases, for “this
secrecy is not the secrecy ascribed to the postulated
episodes of the ghostly shadow-world” (1949a, 35).
There will indeed be cases in which only the agent
can say whether she is pondering, imagining,
dreaming, letting her mind wander, calculating,
solving, planning, or rehearsing. But the sort of
privacy in which only she can say whether she was
doing any of these or other particular things is not
the sort of privacy that gives rise to philosophical
conundrums like the problem of other minds and the
problem of necessarily private languages. On the
contrary, the ability to describe one's dreams (as
well as one's sensations) presupposes a language
whose terms have established and public criteria for
their correct use.
9. Dispositions
A constant irritant for Ryle, throughout his writings,
is “the preposterous assumption that every true or
false statement either asserts or denies that a
mentioned object or set of objects possesses a
specified attribute” (1949a, 115).[13] As an example
of a kind of sentence whose primary job is other
than fact-stating, consider laws. Although we speak
of law-sentences as true or false, “they do not state
truths or falsehoods of the same type as those
asserted by the statements of fact to which they
apply or are supposed to apply” (1949a, 116-7). The
way to bring out the difference is to note that part of
the point of trying to establish laws is to find out
how to infer from particular matters of fact to other
particular matters of fact, how to explain particular
matters of fact by reference to other matters of fact,
and how to bring about or prevent particular states
of affairs.
A law, Ryle tells us, is “an inference ticket (a
season ticket) which licenses its possessors… to
move from one assertion to another, to provide
explanations of given facts, and to bring about
desired states of affairs by manipulating what is
found existing or happening” (1949a, 117).
A dispositional sentence such as ‘Jones believes the
earth is round’ is unlike a law-sentence insofar as it
mentions an individual, Jones. But it is like a law-
sentence insofar as its role is not (or not primarily)
one of describing or reporting, or stating that some
object has such-and-such an attribute or stands in
such-and-such a relation with another object. Its
“truth-maker”, to use a contemporary expression,
has to be understood in terms of what would satisfy
it as opposed to what it purportedly describes.
[14]
 What would satisfy a law is not specified or
mentioned in the law-sentence; similarly, what
would satisfy a disposition is not specified or
mentioned in the disposition-sentence. Nor could it
be. What would satisfy ‘Jones believes the earth is
round’ is an open-ended (infinite) list of inferrings,
imaginings, saying, and doings (etc.) on the part of
Jones (1949a, 44). (And note again, a propos of
behaviourism, that if ‘imagining’ is construed in
one of its ordinary senses, as something someone
may be doing just by sitting, unmoving, with his
hand on his chin, there is explicit reference to an
irreducible-to-behaviour mental occurrence in this
specification of what would satisfy the sentence as
well as the explicit denial of the finiteness of the
long list that would unpack the sentence by alluding
to its satisfaction conditions.)
Ryle suggests that ‘John knows French’ is a warrant
which gives us the right to infer that John
understands what he reads in Le Monde or that he is
communicating successfully when telephoning in
French. Immediately on specifying what we are
entitled to do with the inference ticket ‘John knows
French’, Ryle admits that the examples of what
would satisfy the sentence are too precise, for
[w]e should not withdraw our statement that he
knows French on finding that he did not respond
pertinently when asleep, absentminded, drunk, or
in a panic; or on finding that he did not correctly
translate highly technical treatises. We expect no
more than that he will ordinarily cope pretty well
with the majority of ordinary French-using and
French-following tasks. ‘Knows French’ is a vague
expression and, for most purposes, none the less
useful for being vague. (1949a, 119)
To adopt a couple contemporary turns of phrases,
the warrants or inference tickets provided are
therefore pro tanto and occasion-sensitive. The
latter is yet another feature of Ryle's view that puts
him at a safe distance from ideals of analytical
behaviourism.
Ryle concedes that what he says about dispositions
is likely to be contested by the “addicts of the
superstition that all true indicative sentences either
describe existents or report occurrences” (1949a,
119). How could the statement ‘This wire conducts
electricity’ be true unless there were something now
going on, albeit unfortunately behind the scenes?
But consider Ryle's argument against this. Even
those who are attracted by this picture will have to
admit that we often do know that a wire conducts
electricity, that an individual knows French, that a
person is proud, that a sugar cube is soluble,
without having discovered anything in the
appropriate sense “hidden” (read: accessible via
introspection or laboratory experiment). In any case
what would be the point or the theoretical utility of
discovering what is hidden? Ryle suggests the
utility would consist only in its entitling us to do
just that predicting, explaining, and modifying
which we already do and often know that we are
entitled to do. Even if these postulated processes
were conceded, they themselves are hypotheses or
inferences (to the “best explanation”): things the
existence of which are inferred from the fact that we
can predict, explain, and modify the observable
actions and reactions of individuals. So if a theorist
demands actual “rails” to ground ordinary
inferences, this theorist will have to provide some
further “rails” to justify his own peculiar inference
(to the best explanation) from the legitimacy of
ordinary inferences to the purported “rails” that he
supposes to ground them. “The postulation of such
an endless hierarchy of ‘rails’ could hardly be
attractive even to those who are attracted by its first
step” (1949a, 120).
10. Self-knowledge
The editors of a recent volume on self-knowledge
write:
Each of us effortlessly knows an enormous amount
about those of our attributes which go with our
rationality, sentience, and affective susceptibilities:
our beliefs, hopes, desires, and fears, whether we
have a headache or an itchy toe, whether we are
elated or depressed, whom we love and hate, what
attracts or repels us. (Wright, et. al., 1)
Whereas knowledge of others' sensations, emotions,
and intentional states demands reliance on
independently articulatable grounds, self-knowledge
is, by contrast, characteristically immediate. This
immediacy is already enough to be philosophically
perplexing, but not only do we
know differently from others what we think, hope,
and feel, we are also, in normal circumstances,
regarded as knowing best. Furthermore, if we do
enjoy certain mental attributes, we are expected to
know that we do: our mental states are salient to us.
According to the editors, “[t]hese three features of
the epistemology of self-knowledge—
immediacy, authority, and salience— combine to
set a certain explanatory problem…”.
To what extent does this explanatory puzzle arise
because of a tacit allegiance to Cartesianism? We
have already seen how the epistemological
consequences of the Official Doctrine lead to the
problem of other minds. The other side of the
Cartesian coin seems to put us in an especially
privileged position with respect to our own minds.
For, if ascribing mental predicates to others is
problematic, according to the Official Doctrine,
ascribing them to ourselves is problem-free.
Immediacy, authority, and salience are features of
the epistemology of self-knowledge that the
Cartesian view is best-placed to accommodate.
Ryle would see this contemporary expression of the
problem of self-knowledge as a result of the
conflation of various suspect philosophical
tendencies. One of these has its roots in the
epistemological strand of the Official Doctrine;
another is the tendency of philosophers to
underestimate the many-layered complexity of
mental discourse. This includes the refusal to
acknowledge that the same sentence may have
different “elasticities” or kinds of jobs, as well as
the tendency to favour sentence-jobs of informing,
describing or reporting over those, for example, of
explaining, exhorting, encouraging, or admonishing.
For if self-knowledge is to be construed as a sort of
perception of inner states or events that are (by the
special faculty of introspection or by the
“refulgence” of consciousness) “visible” to me but
not to others, then Cartesianism, though seeming to
leave knowledge of our own minds intact, instead
presents an untenable picture of what this
“knowledge” can be. Sorting out this confusion puts
what can genuinely be called self-knowledge on
relative parity with other-knowledge. It will also
leave room for the importance of “unstudied talk”,
“ego-pronouncements”, or “avowals”, which do
enjoy protection from epistemic criticism. But once
the nature of this protection is understood,
philosophical perplexity should be extinguished, not
kindled.
Ryle accepts the sort of privacy or secrecy that
attends our dreams, imaginings and silent
soliloquies and he concedes that besides the
dispositional one there is another sense of ‘know’
which has to do with what a person is presently
thinking, feeling or doing. He does not deny the
existence of mental processes of this kind (again, a
reason to resist calling him a ‘behaviourist’); nor
does he deny that I am the only one in position to
say what, for example, my musings, ponderings, or
dreams are about. Nor does Ryle deny that usually
when we witness something, or feel something, or
act in such-and-such a way we are able, when
asked, to give a correct account of it. He denies,
rather, that either the “luminous” or “refulgent”
view of consciousness or one that buys into the
intellectualist legend is required to accommodate
this ability. He acknowledges that the concept of
visualizing, imagining, or “seeing” in the mind's
eye, and “hearing” in the mind's ear are useful
concepts. He denies that these uses commit us to the
existence of pictures or images that we contemplate
or tunes that we hear: rather than construe someone
who pictures his nursery as the spectator of a
resemblance of his nursery, he should be construed
as resembling a spectator in his nursery (1949a,
234).
Ryle's discussion of avowals introduces, in effect, a
different elasticity in our use of ‘know’, when we
say, for example, that usually a person knows what
she is on about. This has to do with her propensity
to avow moods, feelings, inclinations, intentions,
desires, and so forth. One striking feature of
avowals is that they seem to enjoy a special kind of
security from epistemic assessment or criticism.
“How do you know?” or “I think you must be
mistaken” or “You have been careless in your
observations” do not make sense as rejoinders to
avowals. For Ryle,
[i]f the avowal [“I feel depressed”] is to do its job, it
must be said in a depressed tone of voice; it must
be blurted out to a sympathizer, not reported to an
investigator. Avowing “I feel depressed” is doing
one of the things, namely one of the conversational
things, that depression is the mood to do. It is not a
piece of scientific premises-finding, but a piece of
conversational moping. (1949a, 99)
Ryle warns against construing the fact that avowals
are unassailable as indicating that there is special
kind of knowledge in play. From the fact that these
utterances are protected from epistemic assessment
or criticism it does not follow that we have a special
kind of knowledge about them; any more, says
Ryle, than it follows from the fact that someone is
not a quack doctor that he is a good doctor: for he
may not be a doctor at all (1993b, 216). For with the
idea of knowledge comes the idea of truth, of
justification, of representation, of description, of
taking closer looks, etc.
The standards for assessing “ego-pronouncements”
run along lines of sincerity/insincerity where these
in turn are cashed out in terms of lying, feigning
(for fun), acting (in a play), putting on (for
sympathy), etc. When lying, feigning, etc., are ruled
out, then someone's saying so may be on some
particular occasion what justifies us in accepting or
what gives us a reason to accept what he says. The
question of his being wrong (as measured against
some additional standard) may not arise. If he is not
wrong in saying that he is in pain (because he can
only be lying or insincere in the ways that we are
imagining have been ruled out) it does not follow
that he has a special kind of knowledge. Rather, it
would be more appropriate to say that questions of
knowledge are here out of place. The discussion of
avowals, then, illustrates yet another elasticity or
sentence-job for certain mental expressions. None
of this is to deny that “I am in pain”, for example,
may have a use which, on some occasion, counts as
a description. Indeed, it may be both a description
and a complaint (1993a, 214).
Many contemporary discussions in philosophy of
mind and self-knowledge, accepting a modern
variant of the assumptions of Cartesianism, are
committed to the view that in using mental
predicates, we (or the subject) attribute(s) to the
subject a mental state or condition of which her
subsequent behaviour is a causal, contingent
manifestation. But once the assumption is made that
mental verbs function to pick out such underlying
states or properties, then seemingly incompatible
demands are placed upon these states and the
traditional philosophical problem of self-knowledge
is revealed. Construed as speaking from and
expressing an occurrent state the speaker is
authoritative; construed as speaking from or
referring to a dispositional state she is not.
In Ryle's (and in Wittgenstein's) hands, pointing to
the non-descriptive use of an utterance such as “I
intend to go to the store” or “I am bored” is
supposed to put to rest the mystery of the avower's
authority (on those occasions when
she is authoritative); it is not supposed to invite the
development of a philosophical account to explain
it. It constitutes a step not only in rebutting the
Cartesian's accommodation of this authority, but
also in denying that there is only one use of the
relevant expression—namely, to designate a state,
occurrence, or property—in the first place.
11. Thinking
Ryle's express target in The Concept of Mind was
the Cartesianism of the Official Doctrine, and the
ontological, epistemological and semantic
predicament we would be confronted with if the
view were correct. Because of this target, many of
his reminders about how mental expressions are
used point to the kinds of circumstances and
performances that would satisfy them: often these
include what others suitably trained have no trouble
seeing. But he was dissatisfied that in this work he
left out some of the cardinal uses of concepts of
thinking, in which there may be no performances
for others to witness. Certainly, the concept of
thinking applies to observable performances. But it
also applies to the many thinking-activities we may
imagine of Rodin's Le Penseur who is merely
sitting on a rock with his chin in his hand. Ryle's
professed long-range objective in much of his later
work was to come to an understanding of the
various sorts of thinking qua pensive without
committing either the “Category-howler of
Behaviourism or the Category-howler of
Cartesianism” (1979a, 17). In these later articles, he
suggests that what is needed besides the choice
between “not muscular, therefore inner” or “not
inner, therefore muscular” is a way of enlarging the
domain of the mental so that it includes not only
actions or performances but also certain omissions
or failures to act that are conceived on a relatively
high step of the ladder of sophistication of mental
discourse (1979c, 119).
Like all or at least most philosophically interesting
concepts, Ryle thought there was no general answer
to the question ‘What does thinking consist of?’
(any more that there is a general answer to the
question ‘What does working consist of?’).
When we start to theorise about thinking, we
naturally hanker to follow the chemist's example,
namely, to say what thinking consists of and how
the ingredients of which it consists are combined….
But modelling thinking on processes like perspiring,
digesting, counting, and apple-picking, which can
be broken down into ingredient processes which
have been coordinated in a certain way is a
mistake…. (1951b, 260)
There is a host of widely different sorts of toiling
and idlings, engaging in any one of which is
thinking.
Ryle rejects the view that thinking is symbol
manipulation: indeed, he denies that words, phrases
or sentences are symbols, if symbols are to be
understood as proxies or as representations for
something else (perhaps that which the word is
alleged to designate). Thinking, in the sense of
pondering, calculating, and musing, is not reserved
for the labour of trying to decide things. Nor do we
reserve the title ‘thinking’ for inner processes. An
architect can think out his plan while manipulating
toy bricks as can a sculptor plan a statue in marble
by modelling a piece of plasticine. Additional
labours might be necessary to put these plans into
words. In general, thinking should not be equated
with using language.
Our ordinary ways of describing our ponderings and
musings tend to be graphic and not literal. They
should be histories, not chronicles, and as such the
plot should be told in abstraction from any
particular stream-of-consciousness reports of detail
we may recall. In only some cases of thinking the
accomplishment of a task, if there is one, involves
the thinker's being equipped to declare his policy,
scheme or theory. But there can be thinking where
there is no talking or even the attempt to talk.
Mozart's thinking results in something playable, not
statable; Cezanne may make mistakes but is not in
error. A symphony is not composed in English or
German, it has no translation, and there is no
evidence for or against it. Thus, although it is an
important truth that the products of thinking may be
publishable truths or falsehoods (and not
unshareable introspectibles), this is true for only
some types of thinking (1979b, 85).
When the thinking does result in propositions or
sayings, however, the temptation is on the one hand
toward excessive inflation, and on the other toward
excessive deflation. For the result is not merely a
string of words linked together in a grammatically
well-formed sentence. In recognising this truth,
however, we are tempted toward the view that bits
of language are only necessary as the interpersonal
vehicles of objective Meanings that are thinkable, in
principle, to any hearers or readers of any
nationalities.
These Meanings are for the Duplicationist those
significance-cargoes that are carried indifferently
by your French and my English internal locutions—
though the challenge to exhibit to his Reductionist
critic even one such cargo, prised off its French or
English vehicle, is as usual unwelcome to him.
(1979b, 87)
Ryle's solution is to reject the vehicle-cargo model.
In owning a penny, the duplicationist is right in
saying I own more than a mere metallic disc; but the
reductionist is also right in rejecting the idea that I
own two things: a mere disc and a non-metallic,
unpocketable yet marketable cargo. The word I
employ is not a noise and something else as well;
nor is just a noise. In learning a word's meaning, I
become enabled to conduct with it a host of inter
alia informative, calculative, recording, anagram-
solving, and versifying transactions of quite specific
kinds. Just as a penny is not just a disc and nor is it
a disc and something else as well, so a word is not
just noise, but nor is it a noise and something else as
well. The penny is an institutionally-qualified
enabling instrument that I can use for specific sorts
of transactions. The word is a complexly qualified
noise, endowed with a quite specific saying-power,
endowed by institutional regulations, accumulating
public custom, pedagogic disciplines, and so on.
The formulation of the qualifications of both penny
and word would “require not just some simple
auxiliary nouns, simple adjectives or simple verbs
but a whole batch of syntactically variegated
subordinate clauses” (1979b, 88).
Even if it is true that Le Penseur is saying things to
himself, this description fails because it stops just
where it ought to begin. ‘Murmuring syllables’ to
himself is the thinnest possible description of what
he is engaged in. A thick description may be that he
is trying to find out whether or not the things that he
is saying will lead him where he wants to go:
…in his pondering, reflecting, deliberating, etc., the
thinker is not guiding himself anywhere, but trying
to find out whether this or that track of his own
making would or would not qualify as a guiding, as
opposed to a mis-guiding, or non-guiding, track.
(1968, 494)
Exploring is on a higher-sophistication level than
piloting; and piloting is on a higher sophistication
level than following a pilot's lead. If Le Penseur is
trying to find the proof of a new theorem then he is
working on a higher accomplishment-level than he
is in trying to teach his student his proof when he
has got it; just as trying to teach it is on a higher-
sophistication level than that on which his students
are working in trying to master it.
On its thinnest description, Le Penseur may be
muttering to himself a few geometrical words or
phrases, just as on its thinnest description a penny is
a piece of metal. But to say that that is not all he is
doing (or that that is not all the penny is) is
consistent with saying it is the only thing he is
doing or with denying that the penny is a piece of
metal and something else as well.
A statesman signing his surname to a peace-treaty
is doing much more than inscribe the seven letters
of his surname, but he is not doing many or any
more things. He is bringing war to a close by
inscribing the seven letters of his surname. (1968,
496)
Thinking can be saying things to oneself under a
thin description. Under a thicker description it may
be saying things to oneself with the specific
heuristic intention of trying to open one's eyes or
consolidate one's grasp. It is this specific,
experimental intention that is obliterated, Ryle tells
us, by sweeping generic slogans such as “Thought
is Language” or “Thinking is Saying Things to
Oneself”, whether or not this is supplemented by
“…and Something Else as Well.” The adverb
‘experimentally’ adds not an extra action but the
intention-to-find-out-what-happens-when….
Neither the Reductionist nor the Duplicationist (the
Behaviourist or the Cartesian) can account for the
adverb ‘experimentally’.
They had tried to tell us what pondering is, eluding
that little knot of subordinate clauses, such as ‘…in
order to…’, ‘what happens…’, and ‘…when..’
without which the notion of experimenting cannot
be unpacked; no more than burglary, treaty-
signing, or goal-scoring can deliberately be
described in simple adjectives plus simple verbs,
whether mundane or transcendent. What qualifies
an undertaking as one of pondering or, not very
differently, as one of discussing, is not any
catalogue of simple qualities and simple relations,
whether rude or refined, but some nexus of
statable because statement-shaped conditions.
(1979b, 82)
12. Sensation
Ryle was unhappy with the treatment he gave of the
concepts of sensation and perception in The
Concept of Mind. In both the Foreword and the
Afterword of the chapter entitled “Sensation and
Observation”, he expresses his dissatisfaction at
having given too much to the opposition by having
“fallen in” with the Official story that perceiving
involves having sensations.
In a later paper (1956) Ryle corrects this. The idea
that perceiving involves “having sensations” is
called into question with an investigation of the
ordinary concepts of sensation and feeling and their
relation to the technical notions of sense-impression
and sense-data. (Arguably, today’s notion of
“perceptual experiences” – conceptual or non-
conceptual—also figure as a target of Ryle’s
arguments.) In this section, I shall discuss the
negative thesis that perception does not require the
postulation of sensations construed in its ordinary
sense and why one motivation for postulating sense-
data or sense-impressions should be resisted. In the
next, I discuss a different motivation and show why
the thickness of perceptual concepts thwarts
attempts to discover the “nature” of perception in
physiological, optical, acoustic, etc. phenomena.
Both philosophers and physiologists “pass without
apology” from saying that without optical or
auditory sense-impressions there is no seeing or
hearing to saying that seeing and hearing involve
the having of sensations. But can the sense-
impressions which are supposedly required for
perception be identified with sensations or feelings
in one of their non-technical senses?
Ryle suggests not. On one understanding of
“feeling” or “sensation” we include pains, nausea,
tickles, suffocation, and thirst, which are distressing
in some way. (In the Concept of Mind he notes that
not all “agitations” are disagreeable: “People
voluntarily subject themselves to suspense, fatigue,
perplexity, fear, and surprise…”(95).)
A different understanding of “feeling” or
“sensation” comes with tactual sensations of
external objects and kinaesthetic sensations (of
anatomically internal things and events). Instances
of the latter include the feeling of warmth, say, as
my hand approaches a fire or feeling how cold,
rough, smooth, slippery, or sticky some things are
or whether they are vibrating, stiff, resilient, or
loose.
Pace Berkeley, the difference between these types
of states is not merely a matter of degree: feeling
the warmth of a fire is not like a feeling of pain.
Feeling the fire is hotter than it was before is a
matter of perception, discrimination, or finding out
a difference. People can be better at it than others:
doctors acquire the skill of feeling pulses that an
untrained person cannot and race drivers feel a car
going into a skid well before an ordinary motorist
can. Feeling pain, giddy, nauseous, or high, by
contrast are not a matter of perception, an acquired
skill or that which training can fine-tune. Mistakes
due to carelessness are ruled out when we talk of
sensations qua pain or elation; they are not ruled out
when it comes to perception as discrimination or
detection.
Armed with these two sets of implication threads
(and in this sense, different understandings of, or
things we count as) sensation or feeling, it can be
seen that perception requires neither of these.
Seeing a cat does not require that I feel anything in
the sense of pain, discomfort, tickle, giddiness, or
calm (nor, we can add, relief, amusement, surprise,
or rapture). Nor, however, does seeing a cat or
hearing a violin require that I tactually or
kinaesthetically feel with my eye or with my ear
that which I also perceive. Nor does smelling
require that I feel, in this sense, with my nose. And
though the tongue is a double-sense organ insofar as
I can tactually and kinaesthetically detect the
texture and the temperature of food in my mouth, as
well as taste it, tasting food does not depend upon
my being able to feel these other properties of the
food with my tongue.
So, Ryle says, when philosophers and psychologists
assert that all perceiving involves the having of
sensations or the feeling of something, either they
are wrong or they are using a third, different
understanding of “sensation” or “feeling”.
Let us examine this different sense of “feeling” or
“sensation”. It does not seem to derive from
ordinary use, which, we might suggest, would not in
itself be a problem, as long as the implication
threads of one understanding are not crossed with
those of another. Consider the epistemologist’s
notion of sense-data or sense-impressions which are
posited as candidates for grounding knowledge or
certainty in what is supposedly given in perception.
Suppose this third understanding
of sensation or feeling derives from sense-data or
sense-impressions thus understood. Whatever the
merits or demerits of this view, in order for
sensations—now understood as sense-impressions
or sense-data—to play this foundational role, we
must be conscious of them. Curiously enough,
however, we do not report them. Instead, we report
what we see under different descriptions, which
carry different luggage-loads. (Or, as Austin said, therefore to any exploitation of knowledge or
we report what we see under different descriptions beliefs previously acquired. A datum, as it is used
which depend, in part, on how far we are willing to here, is something that we reason from and does not
stick our neck out.) Someone who claimed to see have to be reasoned to.
something green might subsequently, when he
Ryle dismisses this motivation for introducing
learns of the presence of a cat, claim that what he
sensation thus understood on the grounds that not
saw was the eyes of a cat. The “luggage” that Ryle
all thinking is inferring. Multiplying, for example, is
speaks of here includes the logical threads
thinking but our calculations are not conclusions
(including implication and evidence, etc.) that
and our mistakes are not fallacies. If it is not true
accompany certain descriptions rather than others.
that the thinking that enters into perceptual
(There are more ways to be wrong, as Austin says,
recognition, identification, comparison, etc. is
the more we stick our necks out.) We shall come
inferring then the search for its fund of premises is
back to this in the next section. But now we are
the search for nothing.
investigating a third, new sense of “sensation” or
“feeling” which derives, not from ordinary use, but But worse, why suppose that seeing the misprint or
from the (alleged) needs of epistemology. But what seeing a crop of wheat (as opposed to a word, or a
supports the idea that we see have such planted field) is thinking at all? It may be discerned
experiences? in a flash; there may be no moment, however short,
in which one might be described as pondering,
Not the fact that we report appearances, for, as
reflecting, or putting two and two together. All the
Ryle reminds us, we use the locution “it appears
argument has shown so far is that without a
that…” all the time without committing ourselves to
particular training, recognising a misprint or a crop
having any particular experiences. “15 x 16 appears
of wheat would be impossible. Why suppose the
to make 220” or “It looks as if the river is twice the
exploitation of the knowledge resulting from this
size of the road” commit me to no special sense-
training involves thinking qua reflecting, pondering,
experiences. So, argues Ryle, we cannot adduce
or inferring?
idioms of the patterns “It looks as if…” or “It
appears…” as evidence of the untutored, Here the fact that the misprint is immediately
uninferential manner in which the postulated sense- obvious to him is supposed to need to be explained
impressions are delivered to consciousness. But this not just by reference to his prior education, but also
leaves us with a problem. by the postulation of the performance by him of a
piece of thinking, with the queer property of not
We have, in fact, no special way of reporting the
requiring any time for its performance. (1956, 345)
occurrence of these postulated impressions; we are,
therefore, without the needed marks of our being According to Ryle, seeing a misprint involves the
conscious of such things at all. For there is surely possession of the exploitation of knowledge already
something absurd in maintaining that we are acquired. But this exploitation of knowledge
constantly conscious of some things in the way in required for perceptual recognition, identification,
which we are conscious of pains, and yet have no etc. need not embody any thinking; a fortiori, it
way of telling ourselves or other people anything need not embody inferential thinking. “So the
whatsoever about them. (1956, 343) argument for the occurrence of sense-impressions to
be the data or premises for the inferential thinking
This particular theoretical allegiance that drives
embodied is doubly broken-backed” (1956, 345).
some epistemologists to posit sensations understood
in the technical sense of sense-data has as its source Readers interested in Ryle's thoughts about
the idea that there are two kinds of space, which we perception and imagination are referred to the
know today, thanks to Sellars, as the space of following supplementary documents:
reason and the space of natural law. In the first, the
notion of inference, evidence, premises, evidence, Copyright © 2015 by
and conclusions have their home; in the other is the Julia Tanney <drjuliatanney@gmail.com>
raw “data” understood in the sense of that which is
given or accepted without argument.
The allegiance to this picture has its source in the
view that all thinking intended to result in the
discovery or establishment of truths is inferring. A
child sees a word on a page, an adult sees a
misprint, and an illiterate sees a black mark. Each
has eyes in perfect working order. According to this
view, the difference between seeing black marks, a
word, or a misprint has to do with the reasoning we
bring to what is perceptually given. And sense-data
(or, we may add, perceptual experience) play the
role of what is given prior to any thinking, and prior
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
First published Wed Sep 14, 2016
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961),
French philosopher and public intellectual, was the
leading academic proponent of existentialism and
phenomenology in post-war France. Best known for
his original and influential work on embodiment,
perception, and ontology, he also made important
contributions to the philosophy of art, history,
language, nature, and politics. Associated in his
early years with the existentialist movement through
his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty played a central role in
the dissemination of phenomenology, which he
sought to integrate with Gestalt psychology,
psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Saussurian
linguistics. Major influences on his thinking include
Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger,
Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as
neurologist Kurt Goldstein, Gestalt theorists such as
Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary
figures including Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and
Paul Valéry. In turn, he influenced the post-
structuralist generation of French thinkers who
succeeded him, including Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, whose similarities
with and debt to the later Merleau-Ponty have often
been underestimated. Merleau-Ponty published two
major theoretical texts during his lifetime: The
Structure of Behavior (1942 SC)
and Phenomenology of Perception (1945 PP). Other
important publications include two volumes of
political philosophy, Humanism and Terror (1947
HT) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955 AdD), as
well as two books of collected essays on art,
philosophy, and politics: Sense and Non-
Sense ([1948]1996b/1964) and Signs (1960/1964).
Two unfinished manuscripts appeared
posthumously: The Prose of the World (1969/1973),
drafted in 1950–51; and The Visible and the
Invisible (1964 V&I), on which he was working at
the time of his death. Lecture notes and student
transcriptions of many of his courses at the
Sorbonne and the Collège de France have also been
published.
For most of his career, Merleau-Ponty focused on
the problems of perception and embodiment as a
starting point for clarifying the relation between the
mind and the body, the objective world and the
experienced world, expression in language and art,
history, politics, and nature. Although
phenomenology provided the overarching
framework for these investigations, Merleau-Ponty
also drew freely on empirical research in
psychology and ethology, anthropology,
psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the arts. His
constant points of historical reference are Descartes,
Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The characteristic approach
of Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical work is his effort to
identify an alternative to intellectualism or idealism,
on the one hand, and empiricism or realism, on the
other, by critiquing their common presupposition of
a ready-made world and failure to account for the
historical and embodied character of experience. In
his later writings, Merleau-Ponty becomes
increasingly critical of the intellectualist tendencies
of the phenomenological method as well, although
with the intention of reforming rather than
abandoning it. The posthumous writings collected
in The Visible and the Invisible aim to clarify the
ontological implications of a phenomenology that
would self-critically account for its own limitations.
This leads him to propose concepts such as “flesh”
and “chiasm” that many consider to be his most
fruitful philosophical contributions.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought has continued to inspire
contemporary research beyond the usual intellectual
history and interpretive scholarship, especially in
the areas of feminist philosophy, philosophy of
mind and cognitive science, environmental
philosophy and philosophy of nature, political
philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy of
language, and phenomenological ontology. His
work has also been widely influential on researchers
outside the discipline of philosophy proper,
especially in anthropology, architecture, the arts,
cognitive science, environmental theory, film
studies, linguistics, literature, and political theory.
1. Life and Works
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, in
the province of Charente-Maritime, on March 14,
1908.[1] After the death in 1913 of his father, a
colonial artillery captain and a knight of the Legion
of Honor, he moved with his family to Paris. He
would later describe his childhood as incomparably
happy, and he remained very close to his mother
until her death in 1953. Merleau-Ponty pursued
secondary studies at the Parisian lycees Janson-de-
Sailly and Louis-le-Grand, completing his first
course in philosophy at Janson-de-Sailly with
Gustave Rodrigues in 1923–24. He won the
school’s “Award for Outstanding Achievement” in
philosophy that year and would later trace his
commitment to the vocation of philosophy to this
first course. He was also awarded “First Prize in
Philosophy” at Louis-le-Grand in 1924–25. He
attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926
to 1930, where he befriended Simone de Beauvoir
and Claude Lévi-Straus. Some evidence suggests
that, during these years, Merleau-Ponty authored a
novel, Nord. Récit de l’arctique, under the
pseudonym Jacques Heller (Alloa 2013b). His
professors at ENS included Léon Brunschvicg and
Émile Bréhier, the latter supervising his research on
Plotinus for the Diplôme d’études supérieures in
1929. Bréhier would continue to supervise Merleau-
Ponty’s research through the completion of his two
doctoral dissertations in 1945. During his student
years, Merleau-Ponty attended Husserl’s 1929
Sorbonne lectures and Georges Gurvitch’s 1928–
1930 courses on German philosophy. He received
the agrégation in philosophy in 1930, ranking in
second place.
After a year of mandatory military service,
Merleau-Ponty taught at the lycee in Beauvais from
1931 to 1933, pursued a year of research on
perception funded by a subvention from the Caisse
nationale des sciences (the precursor of today’s
Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in
1933–34, and taught at the lycee in Chartres in
1934–35. From 1935 to 1940, he was a tutor
(agégé-répétiteur) at the École Normale Supérieure,
where his primary duty was to prepare students for
the agrégation. During this period, he attended
Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel and Aron
Gurwitsch’s lectures on Gestalt psychology. His
first publications also appeared during these years,
as a series of review essays on Max
Scheler’s Ressentiment (1935), Gabriel
Marcel’s Being and Having (1936), and
Sartre’s Imagination (1936).[2] In 1938, he
completed his thèse complémentaire, originally
titled Conscience et comportement [Consciousness
and Behavior] and published in 1942 as La
structure du comportement [The Structure of
Behavior, SC]. He was the first outside visitor to the
newly established Husserl Archives in Louvain,
Belgium, in April 1939, where he met Eugen Fink
and consulted Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts,
including Ideen II and later sections of Die Krisis.
With the outbreak of World War Two, Merleau-
Ponty served for a year as lieutenant in the
5th Infantry Regiment and 59th Light Infantry
Division, until he was wounded in battle in June
1940, days before the signing of the armistice
between France and Germany. He was awarded
the Croix de guerre, recognizing bravery in combat.
After several months of convalescence, he returned
to teaching at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he
remained from 1940 until 1944. In November 1940,
he married Suzanne Jolibois, and their daughter
Marianne was born in June 1941. In the winter of
1940–41, Merleau-Ponty renewed his acquaintance
with Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he had met as a
student at the École Normale, through their
involvement in the resistance group Socialisme et
Liberté. The group published around ten issues of
an underground review until the arrest of two
members in early 1942 led to its dissolution. After
the conclusion of the war, in 1945, Merleau-Ponty
would collaborate with Sartre and Beauvoir to
found Les Temps Modernes, a journal devoted to
“littérature engagée”, for which he served as
political editor until 1952.
At the end of the 1943–44 school year, Merleau-
Ponty completed his main thesis, Phénoménologie
de la perception [Phenomenology of Perception,
PP], and in 1944–45 he taught at the Lycée
Condorcet in Paris, replacing Sartre during the
latter’s leave from this position. Merleau-Ponty
defended his two dissertations in July 1945,
fulfilling the requirements for the Docteur ès lettres,
which was awarded “with distinction”. In October
1945, Les Temps Modernes published its inaugural
issue; Merleau-Ponty was a founding member of the
journal’s governing board, managed its daily affairs,
and penned many of its editorials that were signed
simply “T.M.”, even though he refused to allow his
name to be printed on the cover alongside Sartre’s
as the review’s Director. That fall, Merleau-Ponty
was appointed to the post of Maître de
conférences in Psychology at the University of
Lyon, where he was promoted to the rank of
Professor in the Chair of Psychology in 1948. From
1947 to 1949, he also taught supplementary courses
at the École Normale Supérieure, where his students
included the young Michel Foucault. Student notes
(taken by Jean Deprun) from Merleau-Ponty’s
1947–48 course on “The Union of the Soul and the
Body in Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson”—a
course that he taught at both Lyon and E.N.S. to
prepare students for the agrégation and which was
attended by Foucault—were published in 1968
(1997b/2001).
In 1947, Merleau-Ponty participated regularly in the
Collège philosophique, an association formed by
Jean Wahl to provide an open venue for intellectual
exchange without the academic formality of the
Sorbonne, and frequented by many leading Parisian
thinkers. Merleau-Ponty published his first book of
political philosophy in 1947, Humanisme et terreur,
essai sur le problème communiste [Humanism and
Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, 1969,
HT], in which he responded to the developing
opposition between liberal democracies and
communism by cautioning a “wait-and-see” attitude
toward Marxism. A collection of essays concerning
the arts, philosophy, and politics, Sens et non-
sense [Sense and Non-Sense, 1996b/1964],
appeared in 1948. In the fall of 1948, Merleau-
Ponty delivered a series of seven weekly lectures on
French national radio that were subsequently
published as Causeries 1948 (2002/2004).
Merleau-Ponty declined an invitation to join the
Department of Philosophy at the University of
Chicago as a Visiting Professor in 1948–49, but
instead received a leave from Lyon for the year to
present a series of lectures at the University of
Mexico in early 1949. Later in 1949, Merleau-Ponty
was appointed Professor of Child Psychology and
Pedagogy at the University of Paris, and in this
position lectured widely on child development,
psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Gestalt
psychology, and anthropology. His eight courses
from the Sorbonne are known from compiled
student notes reviewed by him and published in the
Sorbonne’s Bulletin de psychologie (1988/2010).
Merleau-Ponty held this position for three years
until his election, in 1952, to the Chair of
Philosophy at the Collège de France, the most
prestigious post for a philosopher in France, which
he would hold until his death in 1961. At forty-four,
Merleau-Ponty was the youngest person ever
elected to this position, but his appointment was not
without controversy. Rather than following the
typical procedure of ratifying the vote of the
General Assembly of Professors, who had selected
Merleau-Ponty as their lead candidate,
the Académie des sciences morales et
politiques made the unprecedented decision to
remove his name from the list of candidates;
the Académie’s decision was subsequently
overturned by the Minister of Education himself,
who allowed the faculty vote in favor of Merleau-
Ponty to stand. Merleau-Ponty’s January 1953
inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was
published under the title Éloge de la
Philosophie [In Praise of Philosophy, 1953/1963].
Many of his courses from the Collège de France
have subsequently been published, based either on
student notes or Merleau-Ponty’s own lecture notes
(1964b, 1968/1970, 1995/2003, 1996a, 1998/2002,
2003/2010, 2011, 2013).
In the face of growing political disagreements with
Sartre set in motion by the Korean War, Merleau-
Ponty resigned his role as political editor of Les
Temps Modernes in December of 1952 and
withdrew from the editorial board altogether in
1953. His critique of Sartre’s politics became public
in 1955 with Les Aventures de la
dialectique [Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973
AdD], in which Merleau-Ponty distanced himself
from revolutionary Marxism and sharply criticized
Sartre for “ultrabolshevism”. Beauvoir’s equally
biting rebuttal, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-
Sartreanism”, published the same year in Les Temps
Modernes, accuses Merleau-Ponty of willfully
misrepresenting Sartre’s position, opening a rift
between the three former friends that would never
entirely heal. Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual circle
during his years at the Collège de France included
Lévi-Straus and Jacques Lacan, and for several
years he was a regular contributor to the popular
weekly magazine L’Express. In October and
November 1955, on a commission from Alliance
française, Merleau-Ponty visited several African
countries, including Tunisia, French Equatorial
Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Kenya, where he
delivered a series of lectures on the concept of race,
colonialism, and development. In 1956, he
published Les Philosophes célèbres [Famous
Philosophers], a large edited volume of original
introductions to key historical and contemporary
thinkers (beginning, interestingly, with philosophers
from India and China) whose contributors included
Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred Schutz, and
Jean Starobinski. In April 1957, Merleau-Ponty
declined to accept induction into France’s Order of
the Legion of Honor, presumably in protest over the
inhumane actions of the Fourth Republic, including
the use of torture, during the Battle of Algiers. In
October and November of 1957, as his second
commission from Alliance française, he lectured in
Madagascar, Reunion Island, and Mauritius, citing
as a primary motivation for accepting the
commission his desire to see first-hand the effects
of reforms in French policies governing overseas
territories. The last book Merleau-Ponty published
during his lifetime, Signes [Signs, 1960/1964],
appearing in 1960, collecting essays on art,
language, the history of philosophy, and politics
that spanned more than a decade. His last published
essay, “L’Œil et l’esprit” [“Eye and Mind”, 1964a
OEE] addressing the ontological implications of
painting, appeared in the 1961 inaugural issue
of Art de France. Merleau-Ponty died of a heart
attack in Paris on May 3rd, 1961, at the age of 53,
with Descartes’ Optics open on his desk.
Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student Claude
Lefort published two of his teacher’s unfinished
manuscripts posthumously: La prose du
monde [The Prose of the World, 1969/1973], an
exploration of literature and expression drafted in
1950–51 and apparently abandoned; and Le visible
et l’invisible [The Visible and the Invisible, 1968
V&I], a manuscript and numerous working notes
from 1959–1961 that present elements of Merleau-
Ponty’s mature ontology. The latter manuscript was
apparently part of a larger project, Être et
Monde [Being and World], for which two additional
unpublished sections were substantially drafted in
1957–1958: La Nature ou le monde du
silence [Nature or the World of Silence]
and Introduction à l’ontologie [Introduction to
Ontology] (Saint Aubert 2013: 28).[3] These
manuscripts, along with many of Merleau-Ponty’s
other unpublished notes and papers, were donated to
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by Suzanne
Merleau-Ponty in 1992 and are available for
consultation by scholars.[4]
2. The Nature of Perception and The Structure of
Behavior
Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong interest in the
philosophical status of perception is already
reflected in his successful 1933 application for a
subvention to study the nature of perception, where
he proposes to synthesize recent findings in
experimental psychology (especially Gestalt
psychology) and neurology to develop an
alternative to dominant intellectualist accounts of
perception inspired by critical (Kantian) philosophy.
Interestingly, this early proposal emphasizes the
significance of the perception of one’s own body for
distinguishing between the “universe of perception”
and its intellectual reconstructions, and it gestures
toward the “realist philosophers of England and
America” (presumably William James and A. N.
Whitehead, as presented in Jean Wahl’s 1932 Vers
le concret) for their insights into the irreducibility of
the sensory and the concrete to intellectual relations.
While this initial proposal makes no mention of
phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent 1934
report on the year’s research, noting the limitations
of approaching the philosophical study of
perception through empirical research alone,
emphasizes the promise of Husserlian
phenomenology for providing a distinctively
philosophical framework for the investigation of
psychology. In particular, Merleau-Ponty mentions
the distinction between the natural and
transcendental attitudes and the intentionality of
consciousness as valuable for “revising the very
notions of consciousness and sensation” (NP:
192/78). He also cites approvingly Aron
Gurwitsch’s claim that Husserl’s analyses “lead to
the threshold of Gestaltpsychologie”, the second
area of focus in this early study. The Gestalt is “a
spontaneous organization of the sensory field” in
which there are “only organizations, more or less
stable, more or less articulated” (NP: 193/79).
Merleau-Ponty’s brief summary of Gestalt
psychology, anticipating research presented in his
first two books, emphasizes the figure-ground
structure of perception, the phenomena of depth and
movement, and the syncretic perception of children.
Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty concludes—again
citing Gurwitsch—that the epistemological
framework of Gestalt psychology remains Kantian,
requiring that one look “in a very different
direction, for a very different solution” to the
problem of the relation between the world described
naturalistically and the world as perceived (NP:
198/82).
Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of
Behavior (SC), resumes the project of synthesizing
and reworking the insights of Gestalt theory and
phenomenology to propose an original
understanding of the relationship between
“consciousness” and “nature”. Whereas the neo-
Kantian idealism then dominant in France (e.g.,
Léon Brunschvicg, Jules Lachelier) treated nature
as an objective unity dependent on the synthetic
activity of consciousness, the realism of the natural
sciences and empirical psychology assumed nature
to be composed of external things and events
interacting causally. Merleau-Ponty argues that
neither approach is tenable: organic life and human
consciousness are emergent from a natural world
that is not reducible to its meaning for a mind; yet
this natural world is not the causal nexus of pre-
existing objective realities, since it is fundamentally
composed of nested Gestalts, spontaneously
emerging structures of organization at multiple
levels and degrees of integration. On the one hand,
the idealist critique of naturalism should be
extended to the naturalistic assumptions framing
Gestalt theory. On the other hand, there is a justified
truth in naturalism that limits the idealist
universalization of consciousness, and this is
discovered when Gestalt structures are recognized
to be ontologically basic and the limitations of
consciousness are thereby exposed. The notion of
“behavior”, taken by Merleau-Ponty as parallel to
the phenomenological concept of “experience” (in
explicit contrast with the American school of
behaviorism), is a privileged starting point for the
analysis thanks to its neutrality with respect to
classical distinctions between the “mental” and the
“physiological” (SC: 2/4).
The Structure of Behavior first critiques traditional
reflex accounts of the relation between stimulus and
reaction in light of the findings of Kurt Goldstein
and other contemporary physiologists, arguing that
the organism is not passive but imposes its own
conditions between the given stimulus and the
expected response, so that behavior remains
inexplicable in purely anatomical or atomistic
terms. Merleau-Ponty instead describes the nervous
system as a “field of forces” apportioned according
to “modes of preferred distribution”, a model
inspired by Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt physics (SC:
48/46). Both physiology and behavior are “forms”,
that is,
total processes whose properties are not the sum of
those which the isolated parts would possess….
[T]here is form wherever the properties of a system
are modified by every change brought about in a
single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are
conserved when they all change while maintaining
the same relationship among themselves. (SC: 49–
50/47)
Form or structure therefore describes dialectical,
non-linear, and dynamic relationships that can
function relatively autonomously and are
irreducible to linear mechanical causality (see
Thompson 2007).
The critique of physiological atomism is also
extended to theories of higher behavior, such as
Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes. Merleau-
Ponty argues that such accounts rely on gratuitous
hypotheses lacking experimental justification and
cannot effectively explain brain function or
learning. In the case of brain function, experimental
work on brain damage demonstrates that
localization hypotheses must be rejected in favor of
a global process of neural organization comparable
to the figure-ground structures of perceptual
organization. Similarly, learning cannot be
explained in terms of trial-and-error fixing of
habitual reactions, but instead involves a general
aptitude with respect to typical structures of
situations. Merleau-Ponty proposes an alternative
tripartite classification of behavior according to the
degree to which the structures toward which it is
oriented emerge thematically from their
content. Syncretic behaviors, typical of simpler
organisms such as ants or toads, respond to all
stimuli as analogues of vital situations for which the
organism’s responses are instinctually prescribed by
its “species a priori”, with no possibility for
adaptive learning or
improvisation. Amovable behaviors are oriented
toward signals of varying complexity that are not a
function of the organism’s instinctual equipment
and can lead to genuine learning. Here the
organism, guided by its vital norms, responds to
signals as relational structures rather than as
objective properties of things. Drawing on Köhler’s
experimental work with chimpanzees, Merleau-
Ponty argues that even intelligent non-human
animals lack an orientation toward objective things,
which emerges only at the level
of symbolic behavior. While amovable behavior
remains attached to immediate functional structures,
symbolic behavior (here limited to humans) is open
to virtual, expressive, and recursive relationships
across structures, making possible the human
orientation toward objectivity, truth, creativity, and
freedom from biologically determined norms.
More generally, Merleau-Ponty proposes that
matter, life, and mind are increasingly integrative
levels of Gestalt structure, ontologically continuous
but structurally discontinuous, and distinguished by
the characteristic properties emergent at each
integrative level of complexity. A form is defined
here as
a field of forces characterized by a law which has
no meaning outside the limits of the dynamic
structure considered, and which on the other hand
assigns its properties to each internal point so much
so that they will never be absolute properties,
properties of this point. (SC: 148/137–38)
Merleau-Ponty argues that this understanding
extends to all physical laws, which “express a
structure and have meaning only within this
structure”; the laws of physics always refer back to
“a sensible or historical given” and ultimately to the
history of the universe (SC: 149/138, 157/145). At
the level of life, form is characterized by a
dialectical relation between the organism and its
environment that is a function of the organism’s
vital norms, its “optimal conditions of activity and
its proper manner of realizing equilibrium”, which
express its style or “general attitude toward the
world” (SC: 161/148). Living things are not
oriented toward an objective world but toward an
environment that is organized meaningfully in terms
of their individual and specific style and vital goals.
Mind, the symbolic level of form that Merleau-
Ponty identifies with the human, is organized not
toward vital goals but by the characteristic
structures of the human world: tools, language,
culture, and so on. These are not originally
encountered as things or ideas, but rather as
“significative intentions” embodied within the
world. Mind or consciousness cannot be defined
formally in terms of self-knowledge or
representation, then, but is essentially engaged in
the structures and actions of the human world and
encompasses all of the diverse intentional
orientations of human life. While mind integrates
within itself the subordinate structures of matter and
life, it goes beyond these in its thematic orientation
toward structures as such, which is the condition for
such characteristically human symbolic activities as
language and expression, the creation of new
structures beyond those set by vital needs, and the
power of choosing and varying points of view
(which make truth and objectivity possible). In
short, mind as a second-order or recursive structure
is oriented toward the virtual rather than simply
toward the real. Ideally, the subordinate structure of
life would be fully absorbed into the higher order of
mind in a fully integrated human being; the
biological would be transcended by the “spiritual”.
But integration is never perfect or complete, and
mind can never be detached from its moorings in a
concrete and embodied situation.
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes throughout The
Structure of Behavior that form, even though
ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted for
in the terms of traditional realism; since form is
fundamentally perceptual, an “immanent
signification”, it retains an essential relationship
with consciousness. But the “perceptual
consciousness” at stake here is not the
transcendental consciousness of critical philosophy.
The last chapter of The Structure of
Behavior clarifies this revised understanding of
consciousness in dialogue with the classical
problem of the relation between the soul and the
body in order to account for the relative truths of
both transcendental philosophy and naturalism. The
issue concerns how to reconcile the perspective of
consciousness as “universal milieu” (i.e.,
transcendental consciousness) with consciousness
as “enrooted in the subordinated dialectics”, that is,
as a Gestalt emerging from lower-order Gestalts
(i.e., perceptual consciousness) (SC: 199/184). In
the natural attitude of our pre-reflective lives, we
are committed to the view that our perceptual
experience of things is always situated and
perspectival (i.e., that physical objects are presented
through “profiles”, Husserl’s Abschattungen), but
also that we thereby experience things “in
themselves”, as they really are in the mind-
independent world; the perspectival character of our
opening onto the world is not a limitation of our
access but rather the very condition of the world’s
disclosure in its inexhaustibility. At the level of this
prereflective faith in the world, there is no dilemma
of the soul’s separation from the body; “the soul
remains coextensive with nature” (SC: 203/189).
This prereflective unity eventually splinters under
our awareness of illness, illusion, and anatomy,
which teach us to separate nature, body, and thought
into distinct orders of events partes extra partes.
This culminates in a naturalism that cannot account
for the originary situation of perception that it
displaces, yet on which it tacitly relies; perception
requires an “internal” analysis, paving the way for
transcendental idealism’s treatment of subject and
object as “inseparable correlatives” (SC: 215/199).
But transcendental idealism in the critical tradition
subsequently goes too far: by taking consciousness
as “milieu of the universe, presupposed by every
affirmation of the world”, it obscures the original
character of the perceptual relation and culminates
in “the dialectic of the epistemological subject and
the scientific object” (SC: 216/200, 217/201).
Merleau-Ponty aims to integrate the truth of
naturalism and transcendental thought by
reinterpreting both through the concept of structure,
which accounts for the unity of soul and body as
well as their relative distinction. Against the
conception of transcendental consciousness as a
pure spectator correlated with the world, Merleau-
Ponty insists that mind is an accomplishment of
structural integration that remains essentially
conditioned by the matter and life in which it is
embodied; the truth of naturalism lies in the fact
that such integration is essentially fragile and
incomplete. Since “integration is never absolute and
always fails”, the dualism of mind and body
is not a simple fact; it is founded in principle—all
integration presupposing the normal functioning of
subordinated formations, which always demand
their own due. (SC: 226–27/210)
The Structure of Behavior concludes with a call for
further investigation of “perceptual consciousness”,
a task taken up by its sequel, Phenomenology of
Perception. In the concluding pages of Structure,
Merleau-Ponty offers a preliminary sketch of
phenomenologically inspired approaches to the
“problem of perception” that set the stage for his
subsequent work, emphasizing (a) the difference
between what is directly given as an aspect of
individual lived experience and intersubjective
significations that are only encountered virtually;
and (b) the distinctiveness of one’s own body,
which is never experienced directly as one objective
thing among many. The book concludes by
identifying the “problem of perception” as its
encompassing concern:
Can one conceptualize perceptual consciousness
without eliminating it as an original mode; can one
maintain its specificity without rendering
inconceivable its relation to intellectual
consciousness? (SC: 241/224)
The solution requires a “return to perception as to a
type of originary experience” by means of an
“inversion of the natural movement of
consciousness”, an inversion that Merleau-Ponty
here equates with Husserl’s phenomenological
reduction (SC: 236/220). If successful, this
rehabilitation of the status of perception would lead
to a redefinition of transcendental philosophy “in
such a way as to integrate with it the very
phenomenon of the real” (SC: 241/224).
3. Phenomenology of Perception
Completed in 1944 and published the following
year, Phenomenology of Perception (PP) is the
work for which Merleau-Ponty was best known
during his lifetime and that established him as the
leading French phenomenologist of his generation.
Here Merleau-Ponty develops his own distinctive
interpretation of phenomenology’s method,
informed by his new familiarity with Husserl’s
unpublished manuscripts and his deepened
engagement with other thinkers in this tradition,
such as Eugen Fink and Martin
Heidegger. Phenomenology of Perception again
draws extensively on Gestalt theory and
contemporary research in psychology and
neurology; the case of Schneider, a brain-damaged
patient studied by Adhémar Gelb and Kurt
Goldstein, serves as an extended case-study.
Psychological research complements and, at times,
serves as a counterpoint to phenomenological
descriptions of perceptual experience across a wide
range of existential dimensions, including sexuality,
language, space, nature, intersubjectivity, time, and
freedom. In Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
develops a characteristic rhythm of presenting, first,
the realist or empiricist approach to a particular
dimension of experience, followed then by its
idealist or intellectualist alternative, before
developing a third way that avoids the problematic
assumption common to both, namely, their
“unquestioned belief in the world”: the prejudice
that the objective world exists as a ready-made and
fully present reality.
Phenomenology of Perception introduces its inquiry
with a critique of the “classical prejudices” of
empiricism and intellectualism. Merleau-Ponty
rejects the empiricist understanding of sensation,
with its correlative “constancy hypothesis”, and the
role empiricism grants to association and the
projection of memory for treating the basic units of
sensation as determinate atoms rather than as
meaningful wholes. These wholes include
ambiguities, indeterminacies, and contextual
relations that defy explanation in terms of the causal
action of determinate things. Intellectualism aims to
provide an alternative to empiricism by introducing
judgment or attention as mental activities that
synthesize experience from the sensory givens, yet
it adopts empiricism’s starting point in dispersed,
atomic sensations. Both approaches are guilty of
reading the results of perception (the objective
world) back into perceptual experience, thereby
falsifying perception’s characteristic structure: the
spontaneous organization or configuration of
perceived phenomena themselves, with their
indeterminacies and ambiguities, and the dynamic
character of perception as an historical process
involving development and transformation. By
treating perception as a causal process of
transmission or a cognitive judgment, empiricism
and intellectualism deny any meaningful
configuration to the perceived as such and treat all
values and meanings as projections, leaving no
basis in perception itself for distinguishing the true
from the illusory.
In contrast, Merleau-Ponty argues that the basic
level of perceptual experience is the gestalt, the
meaningful whole of figure against ground, and that
the indeterminate and contextual aspects of the
perceived world are positive phenomenon that
cannot be eliminated from a complete account.
Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living
communication with the world that makes it present
to us as the familiar place of our life” (PP: 79/53),
investing the perceived world with meanings and
values that refer essentially to our bodies and lives.
We forget this “phenomenal field”, the world as it
appears directly to perception, as a consequence of
perception’s own tendency to forget itself in favor
of the perceived that it discloses. Perception orients
itself toward the truth, placing its faith in the
eventual convergence of perspectives and
progressive determination of what was previously
indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a
completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal.
Science extends and amplifies this natural tendency
through increasingly precise measurements of the
invariants in perception, leading eventually to the
theoretical construction of an objective world of
determinate things. Once this determinism of the “in
itself” is extended universally and applied even to
the body and the perceptual relation itself, then its
ongoing dependence on the “originary faith” of
perception is obscured; perception is reduced to
“confused appearances” that require methodical
reinterpretation, and the eventual result is dualism,
solipsism, and skepticism. The “fundamental
philosophical act” would therefore be to “return to
the lived world beneath the objective world” (PP:
83/57). This requires a transcendental reduction: a
reversal of perception’s natural tendency to cover
its own tracks and a bracketing of our unquestioned
belief in the objective world. Yet this cannot be a
recourse to any transcendental consciousness that
looks on the world from outside and is not itself
emergent from and conditioned by the phenomenal
field. Rather than a transcendental ego, Merleau-
Ponty speaks of a “transcendental field”,
emphasizing that reflection always has a situated
and partial perspective as a consequence of being
located within the field on which it reflects.
The first of the three major parts
of Phenomenology concerns the body. As we have
seen, perception transcends itself toward a
determinate object “in itself”, culminating in an
objective interpretation of the body. Part One shows
the limits of this objective account and sketches an
alternative understanding of the body across a series
of domains, including the experience of one’s own
body, lived space, sexuality, and language. Through
a contrast with pathological cases such as phantom
limbs, Merleau-Ponty describes the body’s typical
mode of existence as “being-toward-the-world”—a
pre-objective orientation toward a vital situation
that is explicable neither in terms of third-person
causal interactions nor by explicit judgments or
representations. The body’s orientation toward the
world is essentially temporal, involving a dialectic
between the present body (characterized, after
Husserl, as an “I can”) and the habit body, the
sedimentations of past activities that take on a
general, anonymous, and autonomous character.
While the body’s relation to the world serves as the
essential background for the experience of any
particular thing, the body itself is experienced in
ways that distinguish it in kind from all other
things: it is a permanent part of one’s perceptual
field, even though one cannot in principle
experience all of it directly; it has “double
sensations”, such as when one hand touches
another, that enact a form of reflexivity; it has
affective experiences that are not merely
representations; and its kinesthetic sense of its own
movements is given directly.
This kinesthetic awareness is made possible by a
pre-conscious system of bodily movements and
spatial equivalences that Merleau-Ponty terms the
“body schema”. In contrast with the “positional
spatiality” of things, the body has a “situational
spatiality” that is oriented toward actual or possible
tasks (PP: 129/102). The body’s existence as
“being-toward-the-world”, as a projection toward
lived goals, is therefore expressed through its
spatiality, which forms the background against
which objective space is constituted. Merleau-Ponty
introduces here the famous case of Schneider,
whose reliance on pathological substitutions for
normal spatial abilities helps to bring the body’s
typical relationship with lived space to light.
Schneider lacks the ability to “project” into virtual
space; more generally, his injury has disrupted the
“intentional arc” that
projects around us our past, our future, our human
milieu, our physical situation, our ideological
situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that
ensures that we are situated within all of these
relationships. (PP: 170/137)
The body’s relationship with space is therefore
intentional, although as an “I can” rather than an “I
think”; bodily space is a multi-layered manner of
relating to things, so that the body is not “in” space
but lives or inhabits it.
Just as bodily space reflects an originary form of
intentionality—a pre-cognitive encounter with the
world as meaningfully structured—the same is
shown to be the case for sexuality and for language.
Sexuality takes on a special significance because it
essentially expresses the metaphysical drama of the
human condition while infusing the atmosphere of
our lives with sexual significance. Like space and
sexuality, speech is also a form of bodily
expression. Language does not initially encode
ready-made thoughts but rather expresses through
its style or physiognomy as a bodily gesture. We
mistake language for a determined code by taking
habitual or sedimented language as our model,
thereby missing “authentic” or creative speech.
Since language, like perception, hides its own
operations in carrying us toward its meaning, it
offers an ideal of truth as its presumptive limit,
inspiring our traditional privileging of thought or
reason as detachable from all materiality. But, at a
fundamental level, language is comparable to music
in the way that it remains tied to its material
embodiment; each language is a distinct and
ultimately untranslatable manner of “singing the
world”, of extracting and expressing the “emotional
essence” of our surroundings and relationships (PP:
228/193).
Having rediscovered the body as expressive and
intentional, Merleau-Ponty turns in Part Two
of Phenomenology to the perceived world, with the
aim of showing how the pre-reflective unity of co-
existence that characterizes the body has as its
correlate the synthesis of things and the world;
“One’s own body is in the world just as the heart is
in the organism” (PP: 245/209), and its expressive
unity therefore also extends to the sensible world.
Merleau-Ponty develops this interpretation of the
sensible through detailed studies of sensing, space,
and the natural and social worlds. Sensing takes
place as the “co-existence” or “communion” of the
body with the world that Merleau-Ponty describes
as a reciprocal exchange of question and answer:
a sensible that is about to be sensed poses to my
body a sort of confused problem. I must find the
attitude that will provide it with the means to
become determinate … I must find the response to a
poorly formulated question. And yet I only do this
in response to its solicitation… . The sensible gives
back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it
from the sensible in the first place. (PP: 259/222)
As co-existence, sensing is characterized by an
intentionality that sympathetically attunes itself to
the sensed according to a dialectic in which both
terms—the perceiving body and the perceived thing
—are equally active and receptive: the thing invites
the body to adopt the attitude that will lead to its
disclosure. Since the subject of this perception is
not the idealist’s “for itself”, neither is the object of
perception the realist’s “in itself”; rather, the agent
of perception is the pre-reflective and anonymous
subjectivity of the body, which remains enmeshed
in and “connatural” with the world that it perceives.
The senses are unified without losing their
distinctness in a fashion comparable to the
binocular synthesis of vision, and their anonymity is
a consequence of the “historical thickness” of
perception as a tradition that operates beneath the
level of reflective consciousness (PP: 285/248). For
first-person awareness, one’s anonymous perceptual
engagement with the world operates as a kind of
“original past, a past that has never been present”
(PP: 252/252).
The pre-historical pact between the body and the
world informs our encounters with space, revealing
a synthesis of space that is neither “spatialized” (as
a pre-given container in which things are arranged)
nor “spatializing” (like the homogenous and
interchangeable relations of geometrical space).
Drawing on psychological experiments concerning
bodily orientation, depth, and movement, Merleau-
Ponty argues that empiricist and intellectualist
accounts of space must give way to a conception of
space as co-existence or mutual implication
characterized by existential “levels”: our orientation
toward up and down, or toward what is in motion or
stationary, is a function of the body’s adoption of a
certain level within a revisable field of possibilities.
Lived inherence in space contrasts with the abstract
space of the analytical attitude, revindicating the
existential space of night, dreams, or myths in
relation to the abstract space of the “objective”
world.
The properties of things that we take to be “real”
and “objective” also tacitly assume a reference to
the body’s norms and its adoption of levels. An
object’s “true” qualities depend on the body’s
privileging of orientations that yield maximum
clarity and richness. This is possible because the
body serves as a template for the style or logic of
the world, the concordant system of relations that
links the qualities of an object, the configuration of
the perceptual field, and background levels such as
lighting or movement. In this symbiosis or call-and-
response between the body and the world, things
have sense as the correlates of my body, and reality
therefore always involves a reference to perception.
Yet, to be real, things cannot be reducible to
correlates of the body or perception; they retain a
depth and resistance that provides their existential
index. While each thing has its individual style, the
world is the ultimate horizon or background style
against which any particular thing can appear. The
perspectival limitations of perception, both spatially
and temporally, are the obverse of this world’s
depth and inexhaustibility. Through an examination
of hallucination and illusions, Merleau-Ponty argues
that skepticism about the existence of the world
makes a category mistake. While we can doubt any
particular perception, illusions can appear only
against the background of the world and our
primordial faith in it. While we never coincide with
the world or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are
also never entirely cut off from it; perception
essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it
reveals is contingent and revisable.
Rejecting analogical explanations for the experience
of other people, Merleau-Ponty proposes that the
rediscovery of the body as a “third genre of being
between the pure subject and the object” makes
possible encounters with embodied others (PP:
407/366). We perceive others directly as pre-
personal and embodied living beings engaged with
a world that we share in common. This encounter at
the level of anonymous and pre-personal lives does
not, however, present us with another person in the
full sense, since our situations are never entirely
congruent. The perception of others involves an
alterity, a resistance, and a plenitude that are never
reducible to what is presented, which is the truth of
solipsism. Our common corporeality nevertheless
opens us onto a shared social world, a permanent
dimension of our being in the mode of the
anonymous and general “someone”. The perception
of others is therefore a privileged example of the
paradox of transcendence running through our
encounter with the world as perceived:
Whether it is a question of my body, the natural
world, the past, birth or death, the question is
always to know how I can be open to phenomena
that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist
to the extent that I take them up and live them. (PP:
422/381)
This “fundamental contradiction” defines our
encounters with every form of transcendence and
requires new conceptions of consciousness, time,
and freedom.
The fourth and final section
of Phenomenology explores these three themes,
starting with a revision of the concept of the cogito
that avoids reducing it to merely episodic
psychological fact or elevating it to a universal
certainty of myself and my cogitationes. Merleau-
Ponty argues that we cannot separate the certainty
of our thoughts from that of our perceptions, since
to truly perceive is to have confidence in the
veracity of one’s perceptions. Furthermore, we are
not transparent to ourselves, since our “inner states”
are available to us only in a situated and ambiguous
way. The genuine cogito, Merleau-Ponty argues, is
a cogito “in action”: we do not deduce “I am” from
“I think”, but rather the certainty of “I think” rests
on the “I am” of existential engagement. More basic
than explicit self-consciousness and presupposed by
it is an ambiguous mode of self-experience that
Merleau-Ponty terms the silent or “tacit” cogito—
our pre-reflective and inarticulate grasp on the
world and ourselves that becomes explicit and
determinate only when it finds expression for itself.
The illusions of pure self-possession and
transparency—like all apparently “eternal” truths—
are the results of acquired or sedimented language
and concepts.
Rejecting classic approaches to time that treat it
either as an objective property of things, as a
psychological content, or as the product of
transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty
returns to the “field of presence” as our
foundational experience of time. This field is a
network of intentional relations, of “protentions”
and “retentions”, in a single movement of
dehiscence or self-differentiation, such that “each
present reaffirms the presence of the entire past that
it drives away, and anticipates the presence of the
entire future or the ‘to-come’” (PP: 483/444). Time
in this sense is “ultimate subjectivity”, understood
not as an eternal consciousness, but rather as the
very act of temporalization. As with the tacit cogito,
the auto-affection of time as ultimate subjectivity is
not a static self-identity but involves a dynamic
opening toward alterity. In this conception of time
as field of presence, which “reveals the subject and
the object as two abstract moments of a unique
structure, namely, presence” (PP: 494/454–55),
Merleau-Ponty sees the resolution to all problems of
transcendence as well as the foundation for human
freedom. Against the Sartrean position that freedom
is either total or null, Merleau-Ponty holds that
freedom emerges only against the background of
our “universal engagement in a world”, which
involves us in meanings and values that are not of
our choosing. We must recognize, first, an
“authochthonous sense of the world that is
constituted in the exchange between the world and
our embodied existence” (PP: 504/466), and,
second, that the acquired habits and the sedimented
choices of our lives have their own inertia. This
situation does not eliminate freedom but is precisely
the field in which it can be achieved. Taking class
consciousness as his example, Merleau-Ponty
proposes that this dialectic of freedom and
acquisition provides the terms for an account of
history, according to which history can develop a
meaning and a direction that are neither determined
by events nor necessarily transparent to those who
live through it.
The Preface to Phenomenology of
Perception, completed after the main text, offers
Merleau-Ponty’s most detailed and systematic
exposition of the phenomenological method. His
account is organized around four themes: the
privileging of description over scientific
explanation or idealist reconstruction, the
phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction,
and intentionality. Phenomenology sets aside all
scientific or naturalistic explanations of phenomena
in order to describe faithfully the pre-scientific
experience that such explanations take for granted.
Similarly, since the world exists prior to reflective
analysis or judgment, phenomenology avoids
reconstructing actual experience in terms of its
conditions of possibility or the activity of
consciousness. The phenomenological reduction, on
his interpretation, is not an idealistic method but an
existential one, namely, the reflective effort to
disclose our pre-reflective engagement with the
world. Through the process of the reduction, we
discover the inherence of the one who reflects in the
world that is reflected on, and consequently, the
essentially incomplete character of every act of
reflection, which is why Merleau-Ponty claims that
the “most important lesson of the reduction is the
impossibility of a complete reduction” (PP:
14/lxxvii). Similarly, the “eidetic reduction”,
described by Husserl as the intuition of essential
relations within the flux of conscious experience, is
necessary if phenomenology is to make any
descriptive claims that go beyond the brute facts of
a particular experience. But this does not found the
actual world on consciousness as the condition of
the world’s possibility; instead, “the eidetic method
is that of a phenomenological positivism grounding
the possible upon the real” (PP: 17/lxxxi). Lastly,
Merleau-Ponty reinterprets the phenomenological
concept of intentionality, traditionally understood as
the recognition that all consciousness is
consciousness of something. Following Husserl, he
distinguishes the “act intentionality” of judgments
and voluntary decisions from the “operative
intentionality” that “establishes the natural and pre-
predicative unity of the world and of our life” (PP:
18/lxxxii). Guided by this broader concept of
intentionality, philosophy’s task is to take in the
“total intention” of a sensible thing, a philosophical
theory, or an historical event, which is its “unique
manner of existing” or its “existential structure”
(PP: 19–20/lxxxii–lxxxiii). Phenomenology thereby
expresses the emergence of reason and meaning in a
contingent world, a creative task comparable to that
of the artist or the political activist, which requires
an ongoing “radical” or self-referential reflection on
its own possibilities. On Merleau-Ponty’s
presentation, the tensions of phenomenology’s
method therefore reflect the nature of its task:
The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the
inchoative style in which it proceeds are not the
sign of failure, they were inevitable because
phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of
the world and the mystery of reason. (PP: 21–
22/lxxxv)
4. Expression, Language, and Art
The concepts of expression and style are central to
Merleau-Ponty’s thought and already play a key
role in his first two books, where they characterize
the perceptual exchange between an organism and
its milieu, the body’s sensible dialogue with the
world, and even the act of philosophical reflection
(see Landes 2013). In both works, Merleau-Ponty
draws on a range of literary and artistic examples to
describe the creative and expressive dimensions of
perception and reflection, emphasizing in particular
the parallels between the task of the artist and that
of the thinker: as the concluding lines of the Preface
to Phenomenology of Perception note,
Phenomenology is as painstaking as the works of
Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the
same kind of attention and wonder, the same
demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the
sense of the world or of history in its nascent state.
(PP: 22/lxxxv)
Expression, particularly in language and the arts,
plays an increasingly central role in Merleau-
Ponty’s thought in the years
following Phenomenology, when he aimed to
formulate a general theory of expression as the
grounding for a philosophy of history and culture.
[5]
 This interest is first reflected in a series of essays
addressing painting, literature, and film published in
the years immediately
following Phenomenology (in Merleau-Ponty
1996b/1964). These include Merleau-Ponty’s first
essay on painting, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, which finds
in Cézanne a proto-phenomenological effort to
capture the birth of perception through painting.
Cézanne epitomizes the paradoxical struggle of
creative expression, which necessarily relies on the
idiosyncracies of the artist’s individual history and
psychology, as well as the resources of the tradition
of painting, but can succeed only by risking a
creative appropriation of these acquisitions in the
service of teaching its audience to see the world
anew. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic
productivity is explicable neither in terms of his
intellectual freedom (Valéry) nor his childhood
(Freud) but as the dialectic of spontaneity and
sedimentation by which Merleau-Ponty had
formerly defined history.
In 1951, Merleau-Ponty summarizes his research
after Phenomenology as focused on a “theory of
truth” exploring how knowledge and
communication with others are “original formations
with respect to perceptual life, but … also preserve
and continue our perceptual life even while
transforming it” (UMP: 41–42/287). Expression,
language, and symbolism are the key to this theory
of truth and provide the foundation for a philosophy
of history and of “transcendental” humanity.
Whereas the study of perception could only provide
a “bad ambiguity” that mixes “finitude and
universality”, Merleau-Ponty sees in the
phenomenon of expression a “good ambiguity” that
“gathers together the plurality of monads, the past
and the present, nature and culture, into a single
whole” (UMP: 48/290). Many of Merleau-Ponty’s
courses from 1947 through 1953 at the University
of Lyon, the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France
focus on language, expression, and literature.[6]
The manuscript partially completed during these
years and published posthumously as The Prose of
the World (1969/1973) pursues these themes
through a phenomenological investigation of
literary language and its relationship with scientific
language and painting. Critiquing our commonsense
ideal of a pure language that would transparently
encode pre-existing thoughts, Merleau-Ponty argues
that instituted language—the conventional system
of language as an established set of meanings and
rules—is derivative from a more primordial
function of language as genuinely creative,
expressive, and communicative. Here he draws two
insights from Saussurian linguistics: First, signs
function diacritically, through their lateral relations
and differentiations, rather than through a one-to-
one correspondence with a conventionally
established meaning. Ultimately, signification
happens through the differences between terms in a
referential system that lacks any fixed or positive
terms. This insight into diacritical difference will
later prove important to Merleau-Ponty’s
understanding of perception and ontology as well
(see Alloa 2013a). Second, the ultimate context for
the operation of language is effective
communication with others, by which new thoughts
can be expressed and meanings shared. Expression
accomplishes itself through a coherent
reorganization of the relationships between acquired
signs that must teach itself to the reader or listener,
and which may afterwards again sediment into a
taken-for-granted institutional structure.
In a long extract from the manuscript that was
revised and published in 1952 as “Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence” (in Merleau-
Ponty 1960/1964), Merleau-Ponty brings this
understanding of language into conversation with
Sartre’s What is Literature? and André
Malraux’s The Voices of Silence. Sharing Malraux’s
criticisms of the museum’s role in framing the
reception of painting, but rejecting his interpretation
of modern painting as subjectivist, Merleau-Ponty
offers an alternative understanding of “institution”
(from Husserl’s Stiftung) as the creative
establishment of a new field of meaning that opens
an historical development. The style of an artist is
not merely subjective but lived as a historical
trajectory of expression that begins with perception
itself and effects a “coherent deformation” in
inherited traditions. Rather than opposed as silent
and speaking, painting and language are both
continuations of the expressivity of a perceptual
style into more malleable mediums. The unfinished
character of modern painting is therefore not a turn
from the objectivity of representation toward
subjective creation but rather a more authentic
testament to the paradoxical logic of all expression.
Merleau-Ponty returns to the analysis of painting in
his final essay, “Eye and Mind” (1964a OEE),
where he accords it an ontological priority—
between the linguistic arts and music—for revealing
the “there is” of the world that the operationalism of
contemporary science has occluded. It is by
“lending his body to the world that the artist
changes the world into paintings” (OEE: 16/353),
and this presupposes that the artist’s body is
immersed in and made of the same stuff as the
world: to touch, one must be tangible, and to see,
visible. Merleau-Ponty describes this as an
“intertwining” or “overlapping”, in which the
artist’s situated embodiment is the other side of its
opening to the world. There is as yet no sharp
division between the sensing and the sensed,
between body and things as one common “flesh”,
and painting arises as the expression of this relation:
it is a “visible to the second power, a carnal essence
or icon” of embodied vision (OEE: 22/355).
Descartes’s efforts, in the Optics, to reconstruct
vision from thought leads him to focus on the
“envelope” or form of the object, as presented in
engraved lines, and to treat depth as a third
dimension modeled after height and width. This
idealization of space has its necessity, yet, once
elevated to a metaphysical status by contemporary
science, it culminates in an understanding of being
as purely positive and absolutely determinate. The
ontological significance of modern painting and the
plastic arts—e.g., Klee, de Staël, Cézanne, Matisse,
Rodin—lies in the alternative philosophy that they
embody, as revealed through their treatment of
depth, color, line, and movement. Ultimately, such
works teach us anew what it means to see:
Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence
to self; it is the means given me for being absent
from myself, for being present from the inside at the
fission of Being only at the end of which do I close
up into myself. (OEE: 81/374)
5. Political Philosophy
From the first issue of Les Temps Modernes in
October 1945 until his death, Merleau-Ponty wrote
regularly on politics, including reflections on
contemporary events as well as explorations of their
philosophical underpinnings and the broader
political significance of his times. During his eight-
year tenure as unofficial managing editor of Les
Temps Modernes, he charted the review’s political
direction and penned many of its political editorials.
After leaving Les Temps Modernes in 1953,
Merleau-Ponty found new outlets for his political
writings, including L’Express, a weekly newspaper
devoted to the non-communist left. Both of the
essay collections that he published during his
lifetime, Sense and Non-Sense and Signs, devote
significant space to his political writings. He also
published two volumes devoted entirely to political
philosophy, Humanism and Terror (HT)
and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955 AdD).
Always writing from the left, Merleau-Ponty’s
position gradually shifted from a qualified
Marxism, maintaining a critical distance from
liberal democracy as well as from Soviet
communism, to the rejection of revolutionary
politics in favor of a “new liberalism”. His political
writings have received relatively scant attention
compared with other aspects of his philosophy,
perhaps because of their close engagement with the
political situations and events of his day.
Nevertheless, scholars of his political thought
emphasize its continuity with his theoretical
writings and ongoing relevance for political
philosophy (see Coole 2007; Whiteside 1998).
The 1947 publication of Humanism and
Terror responded to growing anti-communist
sentiment in France fueled in part by the fictional
account of the Moscow trials in Arthur Koestler’s
popular novel Darkness at Noon. Merleau-Ponty
sought to articulate an alternative to the choice
Europe apparently faced in the solidifying
opposition between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Humanism and Terror criticizes Koestler’s
portrayal of the fictional Rubochov, modeled on
Nikolai Bukharin, for replacing the “mutual praxis”
of genuine Marxism (HT: 102/18) with an
opposition between pure freedom and determined
history, the “yogi” who withdraws into spiritual
ideals or the “commissar” who acts by any means
necessary. Turning to an examination of Bukharin’s
1938 trial, Merleau-Ponty finds there an example of
“revolutionary justice” that “judges in the name of
the Truth that the Revolution is about to make true”
(HT: 114/28), even though the historical
contingency that this entails is denied by the
procedures of the trials themselves. On the other
hand, Trotsky’s condemnation of Stalinism as
counter-revolutionary similarly misses the
ambiguity of genuine history. Ultimately, the
dimension of terror that history harbors is a
consequence of our unavoidable responsibility in
the face of its essential contingency and ambiguity.
Although violence is a consequence of the human
condition and therefore the starting point for
politics, Merleau-Ponty finds hope in the theory of
the proletariat for a fundamental transformation in
the terms of human recognition:
The proletariat is universal de facto, or manifestly
in its very condition of life…. [I]t is the sole
authentic intersubjectivity because it alone lives
simultaneously the separation and union of
individuals. (HT: 221/116–17)
A genuinely historical Marxism must recognize that
nothing guarantees progress toward a classless
society, but also that this end cannot be brought
about by non-proletarian means, which is what
Soviet communism had apparently forgotten.
Despite the failures of the Soviet experiment,
Merleau-Ponty remains committed to a humanist
Marxism:
Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be
replaced tomorrow by some other. It is the simple
statement of those conditions without which there
would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a
mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in
history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of
history; it is the philosophy of history and to
renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history.
(HT: 266/153)
Even if the proletariat is not presently leading world
history, its time may yet come. Merleau-Ponty
therefore concludes with a “wait-and-see” Marxism
that cautions against decontextualized criticisms of
Soviet communism as well as apologetics for liberal
democracies that whitewash their racist and colonial
violence.
Revelations about the Gulag camps and the
outbreak of the Korean War forced Merleau-Ponty
to revise his position on Marxism and revolutionary
politics, culminating in the 1955 Adventures of the
Dialectic (AdD). The book begins with the
formulation of a general theory of history in
conversation with Max Weber. Historians
necessarily approach the past through their own
perspectives, but, since they are themselves a part of
history’s movement, this need not compromise their
objectivity. The historical events and periods within
which the historian traces a particular style or
meaning emerge in conjunction with historical
agents, political actors or classes, who exercise a
creative action parallel to the expressive gesture of
the artist or the writer. History may eliminate false
paths, but it guarantees no particular direction,
leaving to historical agents the responsibility for the
continuation or transformation of what is inherited
from the past through a genius for inventing what
the times demand: “In politics, truth is perhaps only
this art of inventing what will later appear to have
been required by the time” (AdD: 42/29). Merleau-
Ponty finds a similar position articulated by the
young Georg Lukacs, for whom “There is only one
knowledge, which is the knowledge of our world in
a state of becoming, and this becoming embraces
knowledge itself” (AdD: 46/32). History forms a
third order, beyond subjects and objects, of
interhuman relations inscribed in cultural objects
and institutions, and with its own logic of
sedimentation and spontaneity. The self-
consciousness that emerges within this third order is
precisely the proletariat, whose consciousness is not
that of an “I think” but rather the praxis of their
common situation and system of action. Historical
truth emerges from the movement of creative
expression whereby the Party brings the life of the
proletariat to explicit awareness, which requires, in
return, that the working class recognize and
understand itself in the Party’s formulations.
With this understanding, Lukacs aims to preserve
the dialectic of history, to prevent it from slipping
into a simple materialism, and thereby to discover
the absolute in the relative. But Lukacs backtracks
on this position after its official rejection by the
communist establishment in favor of a metaphysical
materialism, and Merleau-Ponty finds a parallel in
Marx’s own turn away from genuine dialectic
toward a simple naturalism that justifies any action
in the name of a historical necessity inscribed in
things. For the lack of a genuine concept of
institution that can recognize dialectic in embodied
form, Marxist materialism repeatedly abandons its
dialectical aspirations, as Merleau-Ponty further
illustrates through the example of Trostky’s career.
In the final chapter of Adventures, Merleau-Ponty
turns his sights toward Sartre’s endorsement of
communism in The Communists and Peace. On
Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, Sartre’s ontological
commitment to a dualism of being and nothingness,
where the full positivity of determinate things
juxtaposes with the negating freedom of
consciousness, eliminates any middle ground for
history or praxis. Since consciousness is
unconstrained by any sedimentation or by the
autonomous life of cultural acquisitions, it can
recognize no inertia or spontaneity at the level of
institutions, and therefore no genuine historical
becoming. More centrally, by interpreting the
relation between the Party and the proletariat
through his own conception of consciousness as
pure freedom, Sartre rules out in principle any
possibility for their divergence. This leads Sartre to
an “ultrabolshevism” according to which the Party’s
position is identified with the revolutionary agenda,
any opposition to which must be suppressed.
In the Epilogue that summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s
own position, he explains his rejection of
revolutionary action, understood as
proletarian praxis, for remaining equivocal rather
than truly dialectical. The illusion that has brought
dialectic to a halt is precisely the investment of
history’s total meaning in the proletariat, ultimately
equating the proletariat with dialectic as such,
which leads to the conviction that revolution would
liquidate history itself. But it is essential to the very
structure of revolutions that, when successful, they
betray their own revolutionary character by
sedimenting into institutions. Drawing on the
extended example of the French revolution,
Merleau-Ponty argues that every revolution
mistakes the structure of history for its contents,
believing that eliminating the latter will absolutely
transform the former. Thus, “The very nature of
revolution is to believe itself absolute and to not be
absolute precisely because it believes itself to be so”
(AdD: 298/222). While Soviet communism may
continue to justify itself in absolute terms, it is
concretely a progressivism that tacitly recognizes
the relativity of revolution and the gradual nature of
progress. The alternative that Merleau-Ponty
endorses is the development of a “noncommunist
left”, an “a-communism”, or a “new liberalism”, the
first commitment of which would be to reject the
description of the rivalry between the two powers as
one between “free enterprise” and Marxism (AdD:
302–3/225). This noncommunist left would occupy
a “double position”, “posing social problems in
terms of [class] struggle” while also “refusing the
dictatorship of the proletariat” (AdD: 304/226).
This pursuit must welcome the resources of
parliamentary debate, in clear recognition of their
limitations, since Parliament is “the only known
institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition
and of truth” (AdD: 304/226). By exercising
“methodical doubt” toward the established powers
and denying that they exhaust political and
economic options, the possibility opens for a
genuine dialectic that advances social justice while
respecting political freedom.
6. The Visible and the Invisible
The manuscript and working notes published
posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964
V&I), extracted from a larger work underway at the
time of Merleau-Ponty’s death, is considered by
many to be the best presentation of his later
ontology. The main text, drafted in 1959 and 1960,
is contemporaneous with “Eye and Mind” and the
Preface to Signs, Merleau-Ponty’s final collection
of essays. The first three chapters progressively
develop an account of “philosophical interrogation”
in critical dialogue with scientism, the philosophies
of reflection (Descartes and Kant), Sartrean
negation, and the intuitionisms of Bergson and
Husserl. These are followed by a stand-alone
chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”,
presenting Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh. The
published volume also includes a brief abandoned
section of the text as an appendix and more than a
hundred pages of selected working notes composed
between 1959 and 1961.[7]
Merleau-Ponty frames the investigation with a
description of “perceptual faith”, our shared pre-
reflective conviction that perception presents us
with the world as it actually is, even though this
perception is mediated, for each of us, by our bodily
senses. This apparent paradox creates no difficulties
in our everyday lives, but it becomes
incomprehensible when thematized by reflection:
The “natural” man holds on to both ends of the
chain, thinks at the same time that his perception
enters into the things and that it is formed this side
of his body. Yet coexist as the two convictions do
without difficulty in the exercise of life, once
reduced to theses and to propositions they destroy
one another and leave us in confusion. (V&I: 23–
24/8)
For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a
sensible world” is the starting point for developing
an alternative account of perception, the world,
intersubjective relations, and ultimately being as
such. Neither the natural sciences nor psychology
provide an adequate clarification of this perceptual
faith, since they rely on it without acknowledgment
even as their theoretical constructions rule out its
possibility. Philosophies of reflection, exemplified
by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of
perception, since they reduce the perceived world to
an idea, equate the subject with thought, and
undermine any understanding of intersubjectivity or
a world shared in common (V&I: 62/39, 67/43).
Sartre’s dialectic of being (in-itself) and
nothingness (for-itself) makes progress over
philosophies of reflection insofar as it recognizes
the ecceity of the world, with which the subject
engages not as one being alongside others but rather
as a nothingness, that is, as a determinate negation
of a concrete situation that can co-exist alongside
other determinate negations. Even so, for Sartre,
pure nothingness and pure being remain mutually
exclusive, ambivalently identical in their perfect
opposition, which brings any movement of their
dialectic to a halt. The “philosophy of negation” is
therefore shown to be a totalizing or “high-altitude”
thought that remains abstract, missing the true
opening onto the world made possible by the fact
that nothingness is “sunken into being” (V&I: 121–
122/88–89). This “bad” dialectic must therefore
give way to a “hyperdialectic” that remains self-
critical about its own tendency to reify into fixed but is closest to the notion of an “element” in the
and opposed theses (V&I: 129/94). classical sense (V&I: 184/139). Merleau-Ponty
denies that this is a subjective or anthropocentric
The philosophy of intuition takes two forms:
projection:
the Wesenschau of Husserl, which converts lived
experience into ideal essences before a pure carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves
spectator, and Bergsonian intuition, which seeks to or several faces, a being in latency, and a
coincide with its object by experiencing it from presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of
within. Against the first, Merleau-Ponty argues that Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a
the world’s givenness is more primordial than the very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive
ideal essence; the essence is a variant of the real, paradox already lies in every visible. (V&I:
not its condition of possibility. Essences are not 179/136)
ultimately detachable from the sensible but are its
The generality of flesh embraces an intercorporeity,
“invisible” or its latent structure of differentiation.
an anonymous sensibility shared out among distinct
Against a return to the immediacy of coincidence or
bodies: just as my two hands communicate across
a nostalgia for the pre-reflective, Merleau-Ponty
the lateral synergy of my body, I can touch the
holds that there is no self-identical presence to
sensibility of another: “The handshake too is
rejoin; the “immediate” essentially involves
reversible” (V&I: 187/142).
distance and non-coincidence. Consequently, truth
must be redefined as “a privative non-coinciding, a Sensible flesh—what Merleau-Ponty calls the
coinciding from afar, a divergence, and something “visible”—is not all there is to flesh, since flesh also
like a ‘good error’” (V&I: 166/124–25). “sublimates” itself into an “invisible” dimension:
the “rarified” or “glorified” flesh of ideas. Taking as
In the final chapter, “The Intertwining—The
his example the “little phrase” from Vinteuil’s
Chiasm”, Merleau-Ponty turns directly to the
sonata (in Swann’s Way), Merleau-Ponty describes
positive project of describing his ontology of
literature, music, and the passions as “the
“flesh”. Intertwining [entrelacs] here translates
exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a
Husserl’s Verflechtung, entanglement or
universe of ideas”, although in such cases these
interweaving, like the woof and warp of a fabric.
ideas “cannot be detached from the sensible
Chiasm has two senses in French and English that
appearance and be erected into a second positivity”
are both relevant to Merleau-Ponty’s project: a
(V&I: 196/149). Creative language necessarily
physiological sense that refers to anatomical or
carries its meaning in a similarly embodied fashion,
genetic structures with a crossed arrangement (such
while the sediments of such expression result in
as the optic nerves), and a literary sense referring to
language as a system of formalized relations. What
figures of speech that repeat structures in reverse
we treat as “pure ideas” are nothing more than a
order (AB:BA). For Merleau-Ponty, the chiasm is a
certain divergence and ongoing process of
structure of mediation that combines the unity-in-
differentiation, now occurring within language
difference of its physiological sense with the
rather than sensible things. Ultimately we find a
reversal and circularity of its literary usage (see
relation of reversibility within language like that
Toadvine 2012; Saint Aubert 2005). A paradigmatic
holding within sensibility: just as, in order to see,
example of chiasmic structure is the body’s
my body must be part of the visible and capable of
doubling into sensible and sentient aspects during
being seen, so, by speaking, I make myself one who
self-touch. Elaborating on Husserl’s descriptions of
can be spoken to (allocutary) and one who can be
this phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes three
spoken about (delocutary). While all of the
consequences: First, the body as sensible-sentient is
possibilities of language are already outlined or
an “exemplar sensible” that demonstrates the
promised within the sensible world, reciprocally the
kinship or ontological continuity between subject
sensible world itself is unavoidably inscribed with
and object among sensible things in general.
language.
Second, this relationship is reversible, like “obverse
and reverse” or “two segments of one sole circular This final chapter of The Visible and the
course” (V&I: 182/138). Third, the sentient and Invisible illustrates chiasmic mediation across a
sensible never strictly coincide but are always range of relations, including sentient and sensed,
separated by a gap or divergence [écart] that defers touch and vision, body and world, self and other,
their unity. fact and essence, perception and language. There is
not one chiasm but rather various chiasmic
Chiasm is therefore a crisscrossing or a bi-
structures at different levels. As Renaud Barbaras
directional becoming or exchange between the body
notes,
and things that justifies speaking of a “flesh” of
things, a kinship between the sensing body and It is necessary … to picture the universe as intuited
sensed things that makes their communication by Merleau-Ponty as a proliferation of chiasms that
possible. Flesh in this sense is a “general thing” integrate themselves according to different levels of
between the individual and the idea that does not generality. (1991, 352/2004, 307)
correspond to any traditional philosophical concept,
The ultimate ontological chiasm, that between the
sensible and the intelligible, is matched by an
ultimate epistemological chiasm, that of philosophy
itself. As Merleau-Ponty writes in a working note
from November 1960,
the idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being
is simultaneously a taking and a being held, the hold
is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same
being that it takes hold of. Starting from there,
elaborate an idea of philosophy… . It is the
simultaneous experience of the holding and the held
in all orders. (V&I: 319/266; see also Saint Aubert
2005: 162–64)

Copyright © 2016 by
Ted Toadvine <tat30@psu.edu>