A Truly Genetic Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty on Transcendental Contingency

Genetic phenomenology, while appearing late in Husserl’s research program, constitutes

the phenomenological starting point for many of his philosophical successors—including
Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s project was initially static, aimed at uncovering
the transcendental, essential, and universal features of human subjectivity (i.e. the characteristics
that necessarily hold for any human subjectivity whatsoever). However, in his later work he hit
upon the importance of the phenomenological study of the temporal development of human
subjectivity itself. This program was extended further with the advent of generative
phenomenology, in which Husserl was concerned with the development of the life-worlds of
socio-cultural groups in addition to individual subjects.
In this paper I explore the relationship between Husserl’s genetic and transcendental
forms of phenomenology, contrasting this relationship with the one found in Merleau-Ponty’s
adaptation of these Husserlian projects. I argue that the relationship between the genetic and the
transcendental differs fundamentally in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. For Husserl,
genetic phenomenology did not pose a challenge to the tenets of his transcendental project. It
was, in sense, a way of filling out certain details that a strictly static-transcendental program
simply does not attend to. A genetic approach might uncover necessary structures of the
temporal unfolding of various phenomena—in which case it would be articulating transcendental
laws of genesis. Alternatively, a genetic approach might uncover contingent structures of a life-
world (e.g. those that emerge in particular cultures or social groups)—in which case it would not
be articulating laws at all, but instead structures of meaning that do not exist at the level of the
transcendental. In light of this, Husserl’s genetic approach either continued his transcendental
project, or else it strayed from it—but in either case, it did not challenge it.
Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, took a much more radical approach to genetic
phenomenology. In the course of his studies of psychopathology, neuropathology, and child
development—studies that extended well beyond Husserl’s superficial familiarity with these
domains—he concluded that many of the features of subjectivity that Husserl held as necessary
and universal were in fact contingent and particular.1 He was forced to decide between holding to
Husserl’s transcendental commitments or doing justice to the phenomena; he ultimately chose
the latter. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty fundamentally reconceives the nature of the
transcendental, developing an account of constitutive features of world-disclosure that are
susceptible to development and disorder as the result of events in the very world they disclose.
Where Husserl’s genetic phenomenology was layered over his transcendental
phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s genetic phenomenology undermines and ultimately displaces
Husserl’s transcendental project. What this amounts to, I argue, is a truly genetic
phenomenology—one that seeks to do justice to the contingencies of human life rather than
support a philosophical position that necessarily denies the profundity of both development and
disorder.

1
Some Merleau-Ponty scholars, such as M. C. Dillon, have already developed the notion of a
contingent transcendental. However, in many cases this notion is articulated as contingency in a
priori concepts, rather than contingency in a priori structures of subjectivity. In this paper I argue
for the latter articulation in my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s position.