Philosophy of Reflection

Merleau-Ponty's name (la philosophie réflexive) for the family of philosophical positions running from Descartes through Kant to Husserl that take reflection — the conversion of perception into thought of perceiving — as the founding philosophical operation. The target of V&I's Chapter 1, "The Perceptual Faith and Reflection." MP's verdict: a philosophy of reflection is "thrice untrue to what it means to elucidate: untrue to the visible world, to him who sees it, and to his relations with the other 'visionaries'" (Ch 1, p. 43). The corrective is not abandonment but hyper-reflection.

The critique begins in 1945. V&I Ch 1 is the late completion of a critique MP had already developed in full in Phenomenology of Perception. PhP Introduction Ch IV ("The Phenomenal Field") is the first programmatic formulation of the critique: reflection "never has the entire world and the plurality of monads spread out and objectified before its gaze, that it only ever has a partial view and a limited power"; "reflection is only truly reflection if it does not carry itself outside of itself, if it knows itself as reflection-upon-an-unreflected, and consequently as a change in the structure of our existence" (PhP, pp. 64–65). The phenomenal-field analysis is simultaneously an alternative to philosophy of reflection and a diagnosis of why the classical Cartesian/Kantian reflection had to fail. V&I Ch 1 radicalizes this critique into a direct attack on Descartes and Husserl, but the analytic apparatus is already in place in 1945.

Key Points

The philosophy of reflection's founding move is to convert perception into "thought of seeing": the world becomes a cogitatum (Descartes), a noema (Husserl), a phenomenon for transcendental consciousness (Kant)
This appears to dissolve the contradictions of the perceptual-faith by relocating everything within the immanence of thought — but only by paying a price reflection itself cannot afford
Three failures: (a) it cannot account for its own genesis (the unreflected world that motivates the reflection); (b) it has a constitutive blind spot (the act of reflection itself); (c) the reflective "return" is a post festum construction that pretends to be the inverse traversal of a constitutive route
"Thrice untrue": (1) untrue to the visible world (which it converts into a noema); (2) untrue to him who sees it (whose embodied seeing it converts into a "thought of seeing"); (3) untrue to his relations with other visionaries (which it converts into intersubjective relations between immanent thoughts, losing the world that we share)
The corrective is not less reflection but hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion) — reflection that takes itself and its changes into account
MP credits Husserl with seeing the problem (the eidetic-transcendental link) but argues Husserl did not draw the consequences

Details

What "Reflective Philosophy" Includes

The phrase covers a broad family. The chapter targets Cartesian reflection (the cogito as ground), Kantian reflection (the transcendental analytic), and Husserlian reflection (the phenomenological reduction). It also targets Sartre's "philosophy of negativity" but more obliquely — Sartre is the explicit target of Ch 2 ("Interrogation and Dialectic"), and MP treats Sartre as a radicalization of the philosophy of reflection that fails for the same reasons.

What unites all these positions is the founding move: take perception, convert it into "thought of seeing," and treat the resulting "thought" as the ground of philosophical work. "When perception is full or effective, it is the thought of perceiving" (Ch 1, p. 30). The world becomes "cogitatum or noema. It no more leaves the circle of our thoughts than does the imagination" (ibid.).

The Three Untruths

The decisive critique is at p. 43:

"A philosophy of reflection, as methodic doubt and as a reduction of the openness upon the world to 'spiritual acts,' to intrinsic relations between the idea and its ideate, is thrice untrue to what it means to elucidate: untrue to the visible world, to him who sees it, and to his relations with the other 'visionaries.'" (Ch 1, p. 43)

Untrue to the visible world: The philosophy of reflection "starts with the principle that if a perception is to be able to be my own it must from the start be one of my 'representations'... With one stroke the philosophy of reflection metamorphoses the effective world into a transcendental field." But the effective world is not a transcendental field — it is "the natural world and the historical world, with all the human traces of which it is made" (Ch 1, p. 5). Reflection turns this world into "the outside of [thought's] own inward intimacy with itself."

Untrue to him who sees it: The reflecting subject is converted from an embodied being-in-the-world into a "thought" — "the I, qua thought, what makes there be a distance and in general any relation whatever from one point of the object to another" (Ch 1, p. 41). But the seer is not first a thought; the seer is first a body. "We reproach the philosophy of reflection... for distorting the being of the reflecting 'subject' by conceiving it as 'thought.'"

Untrue to his relations with the other visionaries: If both subjects are "thoughts," then relations between them must be intersubjective relations between immanent thoughts, with no shared world. But this is precisely what we cannot accept: "If then the others are thoughts, as such they are not behind their body which I see — they are, like myself, nowhere; they are, like myself, coextensive with being, and there is no problem of incarnation. At the same time that the reflection liberates us from the false problems posed by bastard and unthinkable experiences, it also accounts for them through the simple transposition of the incarnate subject into a transcendental subject and of the reality of the world into an ideality" (Ch 1, p. 41).

The "thrice" is precise: each untruth corresponds to one of the three components of the perceptual-faith — the visible world, the seer, and the others.

Reflection cannot account for its own genesis. The "mind's eye too has its blind spot, but, because it is of the mind, cannot be unaware of it, nor treat as a simple state of non-vision, which requires no particular mention, the very act of reflection which is quoad nos its act of birth" (Ch 1, p. 33).

The reflective subject pretends to coincide with a constitutive principle already at work in the world — to "retravel this time starting from us a route already traced out from that center to us." But this is impossible: "The reflection finds itself therefore in the strange situation of simultaneously requiring and excluding an inverse movement of constitution. It requires it... [but] excludes it in that, coming in principle after an experience of the world or of the true which it seeks to render explicit, it thereby establishes itself in an order of idealization and of the 'after-the-fact'" (Ch 1, p. 36).

Reflection is post festum by structure. It can never coincide with the constitution it claims to retrace because it is precisely the operation of looking back from the constituted to the constituting — and this looking-back is itself never accounted for.

Husserl as Half-Way

MP credits Husserl with seeing the problem:

"This is what Husserl brought frankly into the open when he said that every transcendental reduction is also an eidetic reduction, that is: every effort to comprehend the spectacle of the world from within and from the sources demands that we detach ourselves from the effective unfolding of our perceptions and from our perception of the world... To reflect is not to coincide with the flux from its source unto its last ramifications; it is to disengage from the things, perceptions, world, and perception of the world, by submitting them to a systematic variation, the intelligible nuclei that resist." (Ch 1, p. 36-37)

Husserl saw that the transcendental reduction is also an eidetic reduction — that is, the move toward the constituting subject is also a move toward essences, away from the concrete flux. This means the reduction can never reach the "originating": "It therefore by principle leaves untouched the twofold problem of the genesis of the existent world and of the genesis of the idealization performed by reflection."

But Husserl did not draw the consequences. Husserl took this as a problem to be remedied within the reduction, not as a sign that reduction itself is not the right operation. MP's hyper-reflection is what Husserl was on the verge of but did not reach.

Why Reflection Cannot Be Abandoned

A crucial qualification: MP is not advocating naïve realism or a return to the immediate. Reflection cannot simply be replaced by "the unreflected (which we know only through reflection)" (Ch 1, p. 38). Reflection is true in what it denies — it is right to deny "the exterior relation between a world in itself and myself, conceived as a process of the same type as those that unfold within the world" (Ch 1, p. 30). Reflection is right that there is no naïve coincidence with the world.

What is wrong is that reflection then replaces the world with a thought of the world — that it converts our being-in-the-world into "the antithesis of immanence." Hyper-reflection accepts what reflection denies but refuses what reflection asserts. It is reflection that has learned to take its own genesis as a clue rather than as an embarrassment.

The Connection to Sartre's Negativity

Chapter 2 ("Interrogation and Dialectic") shows that Sartre's philosophy of negativity is a radicalization of the philosophy of reflection that fails for the same reasons. Sartre purifies the reflecting subject of all positive content (the cogito becomes pure nothingness, the ipse becomes auto-negation) and the world becomes pure plenitude (Being as positive identity). This appears to give us "the absolute proximity of being to nothingness" — but only by absolutizing the very dichotomy MP wants to overcome.

The connection: both reflective philosophy and Sartrean negativity define philosophy by what it can survey from above (the kosmotheoros). Both ignore that the philosopher is always in the middle of a perceptual world, always already involved in what they reflect on. Both produce a "high-altitude thinking" (pensée de survol) that is functionally equivalent regardless of whether it is positively constructive or negatively dissolving.

Connections

is the target of Ch 1's critique — the philosophy of reflection is what Ch 1 is interrogating
is parallel to the philosophy of negativity — both are forms of pensée de survol (high-altitude thinking)
fails to elucidate perceptual-faith — the perceptual faith is what reflection tries to ground but ends up replacing
should be replaced by hyper-reflection — hyper-reflection is the corrective that radicalizes rather than abandons
is closely related to the philosophy of negativity (Sartre) — Ch 2 shows the latter is a radicalization of the former
is the historical context for MP's distance from his own Phenomenology of Perception — the January 1959 working note disowning the "Tacit Cogito" is a self-criticism of MP's earlier reflective framework
includes Descartes (cogito), Kant (transcendental analytic), Husserl (phenomenological reduction)
contrasts with MP's wild Being approach — wild Being is what reflective philosophy systematically obscures

Open Questions

Is the "philosophy of reflection" a coherent category, or does MP collapse importantly different positions (Descartes, Kant, Husserl) into one polemical target?
How does this critique relate to the post-Hegelian critiques of reflection (e.g., Schelling's positive philosophy, Nietzsche's perspectivism)? MP is silent on this lineage in Ch 1 but his hyper-reflection has strong affinities with Schelling's later thought
Does MP's critique succeed against Husserl's late work (the Crisis, the Lebenswelt analyses), or only against the "transcendental phenomenology" of Ideas?
Is the philosophy of reflection identical with what Heidegger calls "metaphysics of presence"? The descriptions are similar but the genealogies differ

Sources

merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — Course 5 ("Institution in Personal and Public History", 1954-55), pp. 107-108: a critique of reflective philosophy via a different route than the V&I Ch 1 genealogy. MP argues that for a constituting consciousness "there are only the objects which it has itself constituted", the self's relation to its past "yields... by means of a series of fragmentations", and the other's existence "only means the negation of itself". The instituting subject is MP's solution to these three antinomies. The V&I Ch 1 critique runs via the genesis of the reflective act; the Course 5 critique runs via the shape of historical becoming. Both converge on the same conclusion (reflective philosophy cannot do what it promises) but give the critique two independent legs
merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — Ch 1, "The Perceptual Faith and Reflection" (pp. 28-49): the canonical critique. Pp. 30-31 (the conversion of perception into "thought of seeing"); p. 33 (the blind spot); p. 35 (Kant's "if a world is to be possible"); p. 36-37 (Husserl's eidetic-transcendental link); p. 38 (the introduction of hyper-reflection); p. 43 (the "thrice untrue" formulation). Working notes: January 1959 "Tacit Cogito" (the auto-correction).