Time in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

The chapter on time is one of the central investigations in

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Throughout preceding
chapters of that work one meets the claim that theoretical difficulties
raised by the type of description of the perceiving subject that
Merleau-Ponty offers are to be resolved in the investigation of time. For
example, in describing perception, it begins to seem that the perceiving
subject is neither a pure for-itself, nor an in-itself, but rather belongs to
some category intermediate between these two. (PP 122 &350) How is
such an ambiguity to be understood? Merleau-Ponty gives a
presentation that:
“On the level of being one will never understand that the subject
must be at once naturans and naturatus, infinite and finite. But if we
rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of
time those of the body, the world, the thing and the other, we shall
understand that there is nothing to understand beyond this. (PP 365)

Clearly, in Merleau-Ponty’s mind, a good deal of the descriptive

material contained in PP will remain paradoxical until, and unless, these
descriptions are related to the theory of time which he ultimately
develops. Merleau-Ponty’s time investigation is dialectical in character,
indeed, he speaks of it as following through “the internal dialectic of
time in itself.” (PP 411) His first step in this dialectic is to consider the
possibility that time is “in things,” a position that holds the absolute
reality of time independent of mind. Traditionally, such time has been
thought of in connection with the image of a flowing river. This image
means, supposedly, that time is simply the ongoing flow of things and
events out of the past, towards the future. But Merleau-Ponty points out
a difficulty in this position and in the river image. Time cannot be like a
river simply in the sense of a continual flow, because in the case of time
an observer, a witness is always necessary. The flow of time exists only
for some observers capable of fixing point of reference, of polarizing the
flow, and the credibility of the river image, Merleau-Ponty maintains,
results from the fact that an observer is always presupposed. But, he
claims, once we acknowledge the necessity and presence of a witness,
the flow of time reverses itself: it no longer flows out of the past towards
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the future, but rather out of the future it comes towards the observer
and then sinks behind him in the past. (PP 411-412)

The necessity of the witness, and the consequent reversal of the

flow of time leads Merleau-Ponty to conclude that time is not a “real
process.” The position that holds that time is in things is mistaken. Rather,
“time arises from my relation with things,” (PP 412) and at this point the
dialectic has passed over into the opposite point of view: time is “in the
subject.”
In examining this new position, Meleau-Ponty argues that time in
the subject cannot mean that time is to be located in consciousness
either in the form of a physiological trace (of the past) or in the form of a
psychological trace. (PP 412-413) In either case the result would be that
awareness of the past would be construed as simply a present
perception f a present trace, and, similarly, the future would reduce to a
present perception so that past and future would collapse and one
would be left only with the present, an ever-repeated “now. (PP 413)”
He seesthis as also a result of pacing time in the subject as simply an
object of consciousness; when this s done time itself is lost of sight of,
and replaced with the representation or thought of time. Such a thought
levels time into a succession of “nows” which are to be identified and
synthesized by consciousness according to some scheme of
past/present/future. But the synthesizing consciousness is necessarily
locked in he present, since past and future are equally present objects
for him, he is eternal and so the result of this position is that time itself is
based on eternity, because it is necessary that the subject be outside of
the succession of nows and capable of surveying this succession at a
glance and so effecting the required synthesis.

Merleau-Ponty points out a further difficulty in considering time as

simply an object for some consciousness. What was objectionable in the
river image was not that time was pictured as flowing, but that
necessary witness was forgotten; but yet, if we posit the witness for
whom time is simply an object of awareness, then it seems that the flow
of time is destroyed. If this witness is presented as merely synthesizing a
number of co=present ‘nows’ into a succession, this means that at any
point the synthesis must already be completed, and this conflicts with
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the requirement that time always be in the process of coming into being
and never be fully constituted. In a Bergsonian manner he claims that a
fully constituted time, “that series of possible relations of before and
after is not time itself but merely the record of its passing.”(PP 415)

At this stage the dialectic has reached an impasse: one cannot say
that time us simply in things because this ignores the role of the
subject for whom time is, and who polarizes the flow of time; nor can
one simply claim that time is in the subject, because this would arrest
time, and make if it either eternity, or the record of time.

We can expect a third possibility to arise at this point, as indeed

Merleau-Ponty claims that now we must return to our actual experience
of time in order to describe the true of nature. This means a return to
our “field of presence”; this field of presence is “this moment that I pass
working with, behind it, the horizon of the day past, and, in front of it,
the horizon of the evening and the night.” (PP 415-416) It is in my field of
presence that I make contact with time and come to know its passing.
(PP 416) The first problem here is to describe this field of presence;
Merleau-Ponty describes it in terms of Husserl’s analysis of time
consciousness. The field of presence is not an instant, but a moving field
(PP 419), a field that always moves in relation to a background and
foreground:
“The upsurge of a new present does not cause a sinking down of
the past and a tremor of the future, but the new present is the passage
from the future to the present and from a previous present to the past, it
is with a single movement, from end to end, that time ests itself in
motion.” (PP 419)
The movement of this filed of presence gives evidence of a new
kind of synthesis which, unlike the synthesis involved in time in the
subject, is pre-thetic and passive; it is a “synthesis of transition.” (PP 419)
It is not a question here of having my present, past and future before my
consciousness as objects and then intellectually effecting a synthesis,
because these are not objects at all, nor is there as yet any evidence of
egoic activity. Rather, “my present extends itself towards a near future
and past, and meets them there where they are, in the past and future
themselves.” (PP 418) So time, in the field of presence appears as a
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“general flight out of the self,” (PP 419) or the “movement of a life,” a
flight that has been given the names “transcendence” and “existence.”
(PP 418) In this manner, Merleau-Ponty has described the flow of time.

PP—Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception