Pre-objectivity

The central concept of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the realm of experience prior to objective thought, which constitutes the deepest level of the subject's relation to the world. Pre-objectivity is not "blind" Kantian intuition nor raw sensory data — it is already meaningful, already structured, already oriented toward a world — but it resists discursive clarification. According to Gardner's transcendental reading, pre-objectivity has properly transcendental status and its philosophical vindication comes through Kant's Third Critique.

Key Points

  • Pre-objectivity is established through an "overarching antinomy": empiricism and intellectualism are mutually exclusive yet each drives us into the other. We escape this see-saw only by rejecting their common assumption — "objective thought" (Gardner, §1)
  • It incorporates basic formal features — spatiality, motility, corporeality, temporality — without Kantian hylomorphism. These features secure its transcendental status: it is not a naturalistic fact but a condition for meaningful experience
  • Pre-objective consciousness is not "nothing to us" — it is "the very error of intellectualist objective thought to suppose that, without superimposed intellectual operations, the deliverances of perception cannot figure for the subject as meaningful" (Gardner, §2)
  • The concept is philosophically innovative: Merleau-Ponty must show that pre-objectivity is not confused with superficially similar notions in classical empiricism or anti-intellectualism (Bergson)

Details

The Gap in PP and the Third Critique Solution

PP establishes the dependence of objective thought on the pre-objective but leaves open the question of the sufficient conditions for objectivity. The Kantian challenge: if pre-objectivity stands in distinction from objectivity, what converts the former into the latter? Without answering this, the Transcendental Deduction stands unchallenged.

Gardner argues that Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement fills this gap. Kant's analysis of reflective judgement reveals:

  • A "hidden art of the imagination" conditioning categorial activity
  • An order of meaning anterior to conceptual determination
  • A unity of imagination and understanding prior to the object

Since Kant himself is committed to a pre-conceptual order incorporating movement toward objectivity, it cannot be objected against Merleau-Ponty that he asserts the same. What Merleau-Ponty calls crystallization — the becoming of objects as a "lateral process within the perceptual field" (V&I, p. 100) — takes the place of what Kant calls "nature's purposivity for our cognition."

The Dilemma of Pre-objectivity

A dilemma confronts Merleau-Ponty (Gardner, §2): If pre-objectivity can subsist without becoming objective, the question of objectivity's conditions is unanswered. But if it cannot — if pre-objectivity necessarily moves toward objectivity — then why not reduce it to "incipient objectivity, objectivity-in-the-making"? Merleau-Ponty's response (via the Third Critique): it is "a simple ultimate fact" that perceptual experience includes the precipitation of a world of things, and another fact that this world allows itself to be taken up in conceptual determination. Nothing motivates the idea that objective thought represents the "destiny" or Hegelian "truth" of perception.

Crystallization

Merleau-Ponty's concept for the becoming of objects — neutral with respect to the Kantian duality of passive receptivity and active spontaneity. Objects are not constructed (Kant) nor passively received (empiricism) but crystallize as lateral processes within the perceptual field. "On this picture, there is no pressure to reduce the pre-objective to an anticipation of objectivity" (Gardner, §2).

Pre-objectivity and the Late Ontology

In The Visible and the Invisible, pre-objectivity is no longer merely the "deepest level in the subject's domain of presentation" — it belongs to "the pre-reflectively disclosed world which it opens up-and-onto." This constitutes a limitation of a purely Kantian transcendental reading and motivates the passage to the chiasm and flesh. Gardner argues this passage is best understood on the model of Schelling's Real-Idealismus rather than as a naturalistic turn.

The Reduction to the Preobjective (V&I Appendix)

The Appendix to V&I — Chapter 5, "Preobjective Being: The Solipsist World" — gives the most explicit methodological framing of pre-objectivity as MP's positive program. The appendix opens with the heading "The Reduction to the Preobjective" and lays out a methodologically distinct version of phenomenological reduction:

"Since the enigma of the brute world is finally left intact by science and by reflection, we are invited to interrogate that world without presupposing anything... We do not allow ourselves to introduce into our description concepts issued from reflection, whether psychological or transcendental: they are more often than not only correlatives or counterparts of the objective world. We must, at the beginning, eschew notions such as 'acts of consciousness,' 'states of consciousness,' 'matter,' 'form,' and even 'image' and 'perception.' We exclude the term perception to the whole extent that it already implies a cutting up of what is lived into discontinuous acts, or a reference to 'things' whose status is not specified, or simply an opposition between the visible and the invisible." (V&I Appendix, p. 158-159)

This is not Husserl's transcendental reduction. Husserl brackets the world's existence; MP brackets the concepts (acts, states, matter, form, even "perception") that have already prejudged what experience can be. The reduction is not toward the transcendental subject but toward what comes before the subject/object split.

The appendix also contains the famous formulation that gives the chiasm its name in MP's own voice:

"Like the natural man, we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world." (V&I Appendix, p. 160)

The pre-objective is not a layer beneath the subject; it is the structural intersection at which "we become the others and we become world." This is the threshold between the Phenomenology of Perception's pre-objective consciousness (still framed within a subject's domain of presentation) and V&I's chiasm (where the framing itself is interrogated).

Note: Lefort kept this chapter as an appendix because the manuscript pagination indicated MP was setting it aside in favor of "Interrogation and Intuition" (Ch 3). The methodological framing is therefore explicitly something MP was moving past, but the framing nonetheless registers what the methodological situation was for MP at the threshold of the late ontology.

Positions

  • Gardner reads pre-objectivity as fundamentally transcendental, not naturalistic. Its vindication comes through the Third Critique. The passage to V&I is the passage from Kant to Schelling, not from transcendentalism to naturalism (§§1-2).
  • Naturalistic interpreters (unnamed but addressed by Gardner) argue that Merleau-Ponty's use of empirical psychology signals a departure from transcendentalism. Gardner rejects this: "the further ahead one looks in Merleau-Ponty's writings, the more implausible this interpretation becomes" — by V&I, scientific psychology has "no observable importance" (§1).

Connections

  • gives way to chiasm — the pre-objective is deepened in V&I into the chiasmic structure of perception; chiasm answers the reflexivity that pre-objectivity names but cannot fully articulate
  • is validated by immanuel-kant's Third Critique — Kant's "hidden art of the imagination" is the ancestor of pre-objectivity
  • is radicalized by precession — Chouraqui's "principle of precession" names what pre-objectivity becomes once raised to ontological status: the always-already present that precedes the cogito
  • extends into lebenswelt — Husserl's Lebenswelt is the Husserlian version of the pre-theoretical ground; pre-objectivity is Merleau-Ponty's reworking
  • contrasts with Kantian intellectualism — Kant reduces pre-objectivity to the work of imagination in compliance with judgement; Merleau-Ponty insists it is neither subjective nor objective
  • is not Bergsonian anti-intellectualism — Merleau-Ponty carefully distinguishes pre-objectivity from the "immediate" of classical empiricism and the durée of Bergson

Open Questions

  • Does the "para-aesthetic" construal (phenomenology as analogous to Kantian taste) adequately capture the truth-claim of Merleau-Ponty's descriptions, or does it subordinate phenomenology to systematic philosophy?
  • Is the passage from PP's pre-objectivity to V&I's chiasm a deepening, a correction, or a break?
  • Can pre-objectivity be given a formal characterization, or does formalization betray its character?

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — the pre-objective is a continuous theme across the nature courses and Course 10. Course 8 ("The Concept of Nature I", 1956-57) pp. 155-156: Husserl's Ideen II discovers "an anterior stratum, which is never suppressed... at the root and in the depths of Cartesian nature there is another nature, the domain of an 'originary presence' (Urpräsenz)". Course 9 ("The Concept of Nature II", 1957-58) p. 167: "the universe of perception... regains an ontological signification that it had lost in classical science". Course 10 ("Philosophy as Interrogation", 1958-59) p. 184: "It is this preobjective Being, between the inert essence or quidditas and the individual localized at a point of space-time, that is the proper theme of philosophy". Course 11 ("Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology", 1959-60) pp. 195-196: the earth as the site of "pre-objective spatiality and temporality, as the homeland and historicity of bodily subjects"
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the Appendix (Ch 5, "Preobjective Being: The Solipsist World," pp. 156-164) gives MP's most explicit methodological framing of the reduction to the preobjective. Notable: pp. 158-159 (the methodological exclusions); p. 160 (the chiasm formulation in MP's own voice)
  • gardner-2016-kant-third-critique-schelling — the primary secondary source; pre-objectivity is the concept around which Gardner's entire reconstruction revolves (§§1-2), with extensions into the chiasm (§3) and philosophical aestheticism (§4)