Radical Reflection as an Act of Hope: Embracing the Ambiguity of Merleau-Ponty’s

Method

Merleau-Ponty’s conception of attention as presented in The Phenomenology of Perception

involves careful navigation between both the empiricist and intellectualist accounts of the

phenomenon, respectively: Attention neither amounts to the passive reception of the empirical

world, nor can it be reduced to constituting conscious acts of the intellect. Instead, Merleau-

Ponty offers a conception of attention which is completed neither in the world, nor in

consciousness itself, but rather he offers an account of consciousness’ embodied engagement

with, or ‘taking up’ of, the world as a phenomenon which embraces ambiguity and

incompleteness. Through an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of attention, I will attempt to

motivate the inherent incompleteness of consciousness’ taking up of the world specifically with

regards to time: Merleau-Ponty’s ‘radical reflection’.

The second half of this paper will present the type of movement implied by radical reflection

as a re-articulation of an epistemic question, namely: “How can one move forward meaningfully

while embracing ambiguity?” In response, I propose that an answer to this question can be

developed by understanding radical reflection as an action or movement of hope, since, although

it may seem a daunting methodology, radical reflection uncovers the birthplace of all meaning.

I. Empiricist and Intellectualist Errors of Attention and their Mischaracterization of Perception

According to Merleau-Ponty, empiricism models the phenomenon of attention in an overly

passive way, by positing what he calls the “constancy hypothesis” whereby objects exist as

determinate in themselves, regardless of a perceiver in an objective world. In this case, attention

creates nothing - rather, it “illuminates what is already there” (Landes, 24). The result is that
perception is construed as consciousness’ beginning to ‘notice’ the object, and perception is “…

[built] out of [or reduced to] the perceived” (PhP 5/27).

Conversely, the intellectualist theory of attention renders consciousness the ultimate creator,

such that it becomes and thus already contains “…the intelligible structure that attention draws

out” (PhP, 29/51): consciousness gains nothing in perception that it did not already create, and

“need only return to itself” (PhP, 29/51) for knowledge of what it attends to. If this is the case,

intellectualism fails to account for a thing’s ability to arrest attention at one moment, and to

blend in at another.

The intellectualist thus lacks “contingency for the opportunity of thought” (PhP, 30/52). By

failing to take seriously the role of the object as something which offers some resistance or

solicitation to consciousness, the intellectualist construes attention, and thereby perception, too

actively. In short: “Empiricism does not see that we need to know what we are looking for,

otherwise we would not go looking for it; intellectualism does not see that we need to be

ignorant of what we are looking for, or again we would not go looking for it” (PhP, 30/52, ital.

added).

This concise yet pregnant point has important implications for understanding the situation of

consciousness in the world. Perception (if we are not to miss it) is woven with the thread of

consciousness in intentional acts which make things determinate, always against a background of

indeterminacy. Insofar as intentionality can make things determinate for us, the slipping away of

clear or focused perceptions always remains a fact of our perception.

For Merleau-Ponty, however, this atmosphere of indeterminacy is not just an aspect of a

conscious gaze of a perceiving subject, but is deeply engrained in the lived experience of

consciousness as embodied. If we take our lived experiences seriously insofar as they are
embodied, then we notice that we do not “have” the empiricists’ objects which exist in

themselves as complete, seen from all angles, and are constructed or inferred according to

corresponding sets of appearances. Perceptual experience is not a unified series of appearances

strung together by a subject into a meaningful whole within a Cartesian space, nor is it, as per the

intellectualists, the object seen from nowhere, or the “thought of the object” within a complete

and entirely constituting consciousness (PhP 276/314).

II. The Phenomenal Field: Embracing Ambiguity as the Birthplace of Perception

Merleau-Ponty would have us notice that our perception of an object as meaningfully

complete consists instead in the very springing forth of meaning only possible through both the

solicitation of the object and the intentionality of conscious engagement or ‘taking up’ of the

object within the phenomenal field. The phenomenal field is a realm of consciousness wherein

embodied sensory “communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar

place of our life” (PhP 53/79), facilitates the “springing forth of a true and precise world”

(53/80). This field is neither a space for objects in themselves, nor is it a space for consciousness

entirely for itself; instead, in the phenomenal field, we find a spatial place of intentionality that

houses both physical movement and consciousness of movement as inextricably engaged with

each other, where “perception and [embodied, spatial-temporal] movement form a system that is

modified as a whole” (PhP 113/141).

A full account of perception has to account for the imposition of “virtual or human space

over physical space” (PhP 114/142) in order to provide for consciousness’ ability to construct

“…upon the geographical surroundings [and given world] a milieu of behaviour and a system of

significations that express, on the outside, [its] internal activity…” (PhP 115/143). It then comes

as no surprise that an account of perception has to account for the body as an essential
component of perception, since taking the experience of human perception seriously means

acknowledging the ways in which the body opens onto the physical world and shapes the

creation of meaning within it: “Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary

of the body” (PhP 140/173).

At this point, Merleau-Ponty explicitly notes that “everything points to the organic

relations between the subject and space, to this gearing of the subject into his world that is the

origin of space” (262/300). In the phenomenal field, Merleau-Ponty has identified a spatial place

for perception that avoids constructing perception upon its object by identifying a place in which

meaning springs forth in the interplay of consciousness and its object. Merleau-Ponty thus

complicates what it means for consciousness to have an object. Embracing the embodied nature

of consciousness, he rejects notions of perceptual objects which are complete in advance of their

springing forth from the conciousness’ engagement with the world. As I have begun to suggest,

this is closely tied to the gearing of the subject into the world understood as the origin of space.

III. Bodily Past and Situatedness in Temporal Space

Earlier, we followed Merleau-Ponty in his rejection of both empiricist and intellectualist

conceptions of perception, because they both assume their objects to be complete somewhere by

failing to notice that it is only after our limited and situated experience of things as meaningful

that we can reason about them in determinate ways. Consciousness cannot ‘have’ its objects in

advance. Hidden within this point is what Merleau-Ponty takes as key to the nature of

perception: that meaning can only arise in the ‘taking up’ of the given world through the body,

and this body carries with it an orientation toward the world that shapes its way of being-in-the-

world through its non-explicit permeation of a never-fully-present past, future, and human

milieu. Put another way, bodies carry with them a bodily past associated with having been thrust
into a world with a sense of orientation toward this world. Though this past is never fully

explicit, it continuously shapes the way we participate in the creation of meaning in the world.

Merleau-Ponty refers to this as a ‘past that has never been present’ which can be understood as

the origins of the ‘intentional arc’: the “non-thetic intentionality which creates the unity of our

experience and our world…” (Landes, 114). Here we begin to see the link between space and

time with regards to consciousness—from the moment of birth, our bodies carry with them a past

which gears our consciousnesses into a meaningful future, through the way our bodies help to

shape our ‘nows.’

Indeed, time is how Merleau-Ponty opts to make sense of our consciousness’ ability to

perceive meaningful objects, though never ‘having’ or ‘possessing’ them all at once in the ways

posited by the empiricist or intellectualist. If we cannot have it all at once, our subjectivity “…at

the level of perception, is nothing more than temporality, and […is] what allows us to leave to

the subject of perception his opacity and his history” (PhP 248/286).

We noted above that the situatedness of the embodied consciousness limits its own

consciousness to the extent that constitutes its perspectival opening onto the world. In order to

make sense of the intentional synthesis of objects we must understand this situatedness not only

as spatial (and thus spatially limiting) but also as temporal. It is through our bodies that we are

thrust into a temporal-spatial mode of being. Through our connectedness to the past which has

never been present, we are compelled forward in terms of a future that is not possessed.

Merleau-Ponty calls this “transition synthesis” and it can be understood by returning to the

concept of the gaze: “The act of seeing is indivisibly prospective (since the object is at the end of

my focusing movement) and retrospective (since it will be presented as anterior to its

appearance, along with the “stimulus”, the motive, of the prime mover of every process since its

beginning) (PhP 43/67).

As with focusing, a certain degree of passivity is required of the embodied consciousness

if its gaze may be solicited by the object. A certain amount of active engagement is required as

well if it is to be tied together meaningfully in space-time. This means that “perception never

enacts the synthesis of its object at present […] because the unity of the object appears through

time, and because time escapes to the precise extent that it is grasped” (PhP 250/287). The nature

of space and time prevent objects from occurring all at once, and thus, by focusing in on one

spatial moment, another slips into a more general atmosphere of indeterminacy.

The appearance of perception “in the impersonal mode of the ‘One’” (PhP 249/287)

shows us that “every focusing act must be renewed, otherwise it falls into the unconscious” (PhP

349/287). Again, this takes place in a phenomenal field, the paradoxical spatial place which

“tolerates ambiguity” (PhP 11/34), by embracing those phenomena which cannot be housed

without contradiction in objective space, like “…a touching body and a body touched” (PhP

98/124). Since perception is possible in this realm of experience which is “irreducibly both

physical (temporal) and psychical” (Landes, 20), the embodied human consciousness itself must

be grasped within the same ambiguous tension as all objects. This is “the fate of the being who is

born, that is, a being who once and for all who was given to himself as something to be

understood” (PhP 362/404). We thus encounter “the problems of transcendence” (PhP 381/422)

and must ask “…how [we] can be open to phenomena that transcend [us] and that, nevertheless,

only exist to the extent that [we] take them up and live them” (PhP) 381/422).

Merleau-Ponty thus prescribes “radical reflection” as the only rigorous way of

understanding the sense springing forth from our ambiguous perceptual world. Radical reflection
“…consists paradoxically in recovering the unreflective experience [the past that was never

present] of the world in order to import the attitude of verification and reflective operations back

into this experience, and in order to reveal reflection as one of the abilities of [one’s] being”

(251/288). In other words, the embodied subject must make sense of its present(s)

retrospectively, in terms of and with careful attention to the meaning carried by its non-explicit

bodily past. Although the embodied consciousness can never ‘have’ its past in the way it has

‘has’ its present, it carries a meaningful intentionality because of its situatedness in time in

relation to this past. Therefore, retrospective reflection on the meaning that springs forth in

present moments must be understood in terms of its emergence out of an ambiguous past.

IV. Despair: Kierkegaard’s Insights regarding the Affront of Ambiguity

How are we to move forward with this ambiguity? Is not this paradoxical mode of being

fraught with tension when compared to empiricists’ and intellectualists’ ability to at least assume

perception to be complete somewhere? To this, we can answer “No!”, if we consider Merleau-

Ponty’s “radical reflection” as a radical act of hope. I contend that understanding radical

reflection in terms of hope reinforces its viability as the only rigorous way of understanding the

sense of the ambiguous perceptual world. Hope, as I will attempt to show, is the epistemic

attitude most conducive to the possibility of knowledge, because it is characterized by conscious

movement which tolerates the world’s ambiguity while still allowing for the springing forth of

meaning.

Let us broach an understanding of hope through briefly considering the lack of hope:

despair. Soren Kierkegaard`s The Sickness Unto Death offers an in depth exploration of what it

means to despair, and he defines the concept in detail throughout his work: despair is “after
being taught by a revelation from God1 what [despair] is—before God in despair not to will to be

oneself or to in despair to will to be oneself” (Kierkegaard, 96). Now, understanding what is

meant by this first means establishing what Kierkegaard means by “self”. In the introduction to

this work, he says that the human being is a synthesis, and insofar as it is a self, needs to be

understood, (under the qualification of the psychical), as ”the relation between the psychical and

the physical […which] then relates itself to another” (Kierkegaard, 13-14).

Earlier we saw that for Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is of the phenomenal field: the

spatial place wherein the relation of the psychical and the physical being is possible. This can

account for Kierkegaard’s ‘self’ as a psychical-physical synthesis, subsumed under the category

of the psychical, as similar to what Mearleau-Ponty understands as personal consciousness. The

third part of this relation, wherein this relational synthesis relates itself to another can then

further be accounted for as analogous to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of our experiences of other

consciousnesses. After spending the first two parts of the Phenomenology of Perception

discussing the body, the world, and the thing, Merleau-Ponty considers the encounters between

psycho-physical consciousnesses and other consciousnessess as yet another of existence`s

paradoxical relations and a birthplace for knowledge: “Consciousnesses present the absurdity of

a solipsism-shared-by-many, and such is the situation that must be understood” (PhP 376/418).

Now that we have established some common ground for these similar versions of the self,

we can more directly look into what Kierkegaard`s definition of despair illuminates concerning

Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection. Kierkegaard asserts that “the self that [one] despairingly

1
Here I take the Christian conception of God as i ter ha gea le ith knowledge͛ or ͚meaning͛. In the Neo-
Platonic Christian tradition, all true perception is inextricably linked to God, as He is known through His effects. The
re ealed k o ledge of God is said to e a i o plete refle tio of Hi , hi h, though ertai ly li ited i
comparison to actual knowledge of God, is enough to inspire the faithful to believe knowledge of Him to be
possible.
wants to be is a self that he is not, (for to will to be the self that he is in truth is the very opposite

of despair). In spite of his despair, however, he cannot manage to do it…that power [that

established it] is, however, stronger and forces him to be the self he does not want to be”

(Kierkegaard, 20). On this definition, it seems that to despair is in some sense to deny one`s

nature, though in actuality the subject’s denial of their nature seems to do little to effect change

in the nature itself.

Kierkegaard further elaborates that this despair can be enacted in two related ways. The

first form of despair is “the despair that is ignorant of being despair”, and is characterized by the

subject`s being “completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives

in sensate categories […and thus] waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc. because he is too sensate to

venture out and to endure being spirit” (Kierkegaard, 43). Recalling our earlier discussion of the

empiricist view of perception, this form of despair bears a striking resemblance to the way in

which the empiricist misses the active or constituting aspect of perceptual consciousness by

reducing meaning to appearances created in a passive subject by the sensory experiences of

objects. This despairing subject, for Kierkegaard, does not know it is in despair, for it has no

concept of its relationship to non-personal consciousness. This self loses its ability to see

possibility in meaning outside what is caused by determinate objects of sense, and denies the

active possibilities of its own consciousness.

Conversely, Kierkegaard considers “the despair that is conscious of being despair”

(Kierkegaard, 47), as the very upheaval of the sensory world, or “despair over the earthly”

(Kierkegaard, 67). He characterises this as an act of defiance, in contrast with the passivity or

“weakness” of the former type of despair: “Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act; it

does not come from the outside as a suffering under the pressure of externalities but comes
directly from the self” (Kierkegaard, 67). This echoes the errors of Merleau-Ponty’s

intellectualist, who reduces perception to an entirely active and constituting consciousness,

which “need only return to itself” to possess its perceptual objects.

Most importantly, Kierkegaard notes that this self “wants to be the master of itself or to

create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be […] In this way, he wants to begin a

little earlier than do other men, not at and with the beginning, but ‘in the beginning’”

(Kierkegaard, 68). As was the case with the intellectualist, the one who despairs in this way

would attempt to reduce their consciousness to mental life alienated from its embodied

situatedness in the world—a situatedness that carries with it our never-present past and in doing

so helps to shape our intentional, embodied engagement in the world. Without this embodied

past, there is no space for contingencies in meaning: “consciousness is too rich” (PhP 30/52) and

consciousness is unable to be passively affected by objects that solicit attention.

For Kierkegaard, the denial of the past that has never been present consists in humans’

denial of our limited, embodied nature as having its origin in original sin2, though it has the same

effect as the denial of the embodied or primordial past in Merleau-Ponty—namely, that the

subject is ignorant of the origins of its being in the world (a spatial-temporal thread of meaning

through time). The embodied, conscious subject can thus not fully understand the meaning

springing forth from its world over time even retrospectively, since it does not carry weight of

where it came from or momentum to where it might be going. Despair in either such ways is a

failure of will, because in each case the subject wills its object to appear as fully determinate,

22
For Kierkegaard, understanding the paradoxical and limited situation of humans requires an understanding of
this li ited ess as rooted i Ada a d E e s origi al si of desiri g deter i ate k o ledge of God. O e ho is ot
aware of this past cannot really know what it means to sin, to be ignorant, or to have their knowledge be limited:
[One who ignores this past] does not really enter into the whole investigation with which Christianity begins, into
the prius (antecedent state) in which sin presupposes itself and which is explained in Christianity in the dogma of
hereditary si Kierkegaard, .
whether in the world for the empiricist, or in the constituting consciousness for the intellectualist.

For Kierkegaard, divorcing oneself from one’s never present past means not being able to make

sense of our actions as ‘right,’ as oriented toward the Divine or God. For Merleau-Ponty, this

means making radical reflection impossible by being unable to gain retroactive insight into our

perceptions through time as part of a spatial-temporal trajectory of meaning.

V. Hope: Radical Reflection as the Will’s Movement Toward Something it does Not Possess

Despair has thus been characterized as an interruption in the possibility for radical

reflection through one’s willing that an object be complete somewhere, all at once, or in advance

of its springing forth in time. This means that hope, as despair’s antithesis, must be some sort of

opening up toward meaning wherein objects are neither willed to be determinate, nor passively

ignored by the will. A classical conception of hope as per Thomas Aquinas designates the virtue

of hope as the “movement of our appetite towards what we perceive as a good difficult, but

possible, to achieve in the future” (ST I-II, Q 39, ii ad. 1).

Aquinas’ mention of the future may seem misleading here if it is thought to imply a goal

that is set up in advance, or a goal entirely focused on blind forward movement. Here, however,

we must note that though “hope [is] some sort of movement or stretching of desire towards the

good that challenges us” (ST I-II Q 33, ii, ad 3), in order “[t]o hope for anything we must believe

it possible” (ST I-II Q 33, ii, ad 6). If our knowledge of the good (God, or meaning) was able to

be possessed all at once and did not challenge us through its being incomplete, or ‘possible’ then

it would not require hope.

It is helpful to remember that Christians believe it is revealed knowledge of God—a

“piece” of knowledge of It possessed or known in the limited way humans can know—that

guides them toward their goal of God. This means being connected with one’s ambiguous past
entails accounting for one’s nature as a limited being of original sin; the imperfections of our

very bodies stand as indicators of past indiscretions that simultaneously limit our knowledge of

God and make proceeding in hope toward knowledge of It possible: “[Individuals have bodies

naturally disposed or indisposed to certain virtues, since our bodily condition affects our sensory

organs and our sensing affects our mental powers” (ST I-II Q 63, ii, ad. 2). We thus must

understand the origins of the incompleteness of our knowledge in the present and proceed

tentatively, though not without hope, in the continued springing forth of meaning into a not fully

determined future. One must believe this future to be possible nonetheless: “Hope […] is a word

implying imperfection, [since it] moves towards something it does not possess” (ST I-II Q 60, ii,

ad. 4).

Hope, then, like Merleau-Ponty’s ‘radical reflection’, would seem to involve a willful

movement toward a goal that is not set up in advance—a move that to be rightly understood as

‘hopeful’ is necessarily going to involve incompleteness. In order to avoid falling into despair,

we must not shut down the possibility of meaning or fall out of touch with being in either of

theseway: through the despair which assumes its world complete or determined in itself, or the

despair that assumes consciousness has already completed its world, somewhere, through its own

constituting power.

Indeed, the retrospective elucidation required to understand the nature of our present(s),

and the taking up of the world in its own time is daunting. Mistakes arise because proceeding

toward meaning in this way requires being at peace with the nature of time as perpetually

incomplete. However, insofar as radically reflective acts open up the possibility of meaning or

knowledge, it is be necessary to take up the world as it is, incomplete and through time, if we
want hope to “spring eternal”, facilitating the perpetual taking up of more meaning, lest we fall

into despair.

We must acknowledge and embrace “…the ambiguous life where the Ursrprung of

transcendences takes place, which, through a fundamental contradiction, puts me into

communication with them and on this basis makes knowledge possible” (PhP 382/423).

Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection is best understood as an act of hope insofar as it is an act in

time or with time—and, only then, insofar as time emerges out of an ambiguous past and into an

indeterminate future. Only when we proceed in terms of hope or possibility does this ambiguous

atmosphere become surmountable, even welcoming, as the birthplace of all meaning.

 Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation. Ed. Timothy S. McDermott.

Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1991. Print.

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening. Ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1980. Print.

Landes, Donald A. The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Print.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Abingdon,

Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Works Consulted

Sallis, John. Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP;
Distributed by Humanities, New York, 1973. Print.

Soskice, Janet. "The Gift of the Name: Moses and the Burning Bush."Silence and the Word:
Negative Theology and Incarnation. Ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge UP, 2002. 61-75. Print.

Roscanu, Radu. Dieu, Cet Inconnu: L'Apophatisme De L'́glise De L'Orient. Laval, Qúbec:
́ditions De La Transfiguration, 2001. Print.

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