Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in the light of Kant's Third Critique and Schelling's Real-Idealismus

Author(s): Sebastian Gardner (University College London) Year: 2016 Type: Paper (Continental Philosophy Review, DOI 10.1007/s11007-016-9393-1)

Gardner argues that Merleau-Ponty recapitulates the development from Kant's subjective idealism to Schelling's Real-Idealismus, via the Critique of the Power of Judgement (CPJ). The concerns of Phenomenology of Perception are fundamentally transcendental: Merleau-Ponty seeks the conditions under which meaningful experience of a determinate object-world is possible, arriving at the concept of pre-objectivity. The Third Critique validates his alternative transcendentalism by showing that Kant himself is committed to a pre-conceptual order. The chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible structurally parallels Schelling's system of Real-Idealismus. Gardner proposes a "para-aesthetic" construal of phenomenology — analogous to Kantian judgements of taste — but leaves unresolved whether Merleau-Ponty can defend his independence from systematic philosophy.

Core Arguments

Claim: The task of Phenomenology of Perception is fundamentally transcendental — Merleau-Ponty seeks to expound the conditions under which meaningful experience of a determinate object-world is possible. Because: PP employs an "overarching antinomy" (empiricism vs. intellectualism) to establish the priority of pre-objectivity. Pre-objectivity has properly transcendental status: it incorporates basic formal features (spatiality, motility, corporeality, temporality) and its necessity cannot be understood in naturalistic terms. The indirect, antinomial strategy is required because pre-objectivity "cannot be originally discursive." Against: Naturalistic interpretations of Merleau-Ponty — there is "no scope for a naturalistic interpretation" so long as naturalism means what contemporary philosophy means by the term. Empirical psychology in PP signals no departure from transcendentalism.
Claim: Kant's Third Critique validates and motivates Merleau-Ponty's alternative form of transcendentalism, filling the gap left by PP's silence on the sufficient conditions for objectivity. Because: Kant's analysis of reflective judgement in the CPJ commits him to: (a) a "hidden art of the imagination" underlying categorial activity, (b) an order of meaning anterior to conceptual determination, (c) a unity of imagination and understanding prior to the object. What Merleau-Ponty calls "crystallization" — the becoming of objects as a lateral process within the perceptual field — takes the place of what Kant calls "nature's purposivity for our cognition." Since Kant is thereby committed to a pre-conceptual order incorporating movement towards objectivity, it cannot be a problem for Merleau-Ponty that he asserts the same. Against: Kantians who charge PP with lacking a transition principle from pre-objectivity to objectivity (no equivalent of the Transcendental Deduction). Also against the Hegelian objection that pre-objectivity finds its "truth" in objectivity.
Claim: The chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible structurally parallels Schelling's Real-Idealismus — both employ the same conceptual figure for the relation of subject and world. Because: Six elements of chiasmic form map onto Schelling's system: (1) perception occurs within a whole; (2) this whole has the value of the classical a priori; (3) it is equally a medium; (4) perception is a reflexive relation within this medium; (5) two levels of reflexivity — body's and world's — that join, with the body's self-relation deriving from the self-relation of the whole; (6) the reflexive relation is opaque, its fulfilment necessarily elided in the movement of perception. The chiasm = "the self's intentional going out to the world" identical with "the world or nature's return to itself" — paralleling Schelling's circular movement from self to nature and back. Against: The parallel does not guarantee identical conclusions — sharp metaphilosophical disagreement remains (see argument 4).
Claim: Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is best construed as a form of "philosophical aestheticism" — analogous to Kantian judgements of taste — but the question of whether it can defend independence from systematic philosophy remains unresolved. Because: Phenomenological description is "second-order" (a "phenomenology of phenomenology" — PP, p. 382), analogous to how Kantian taste "raises up" ordinary empirical cognition. The phenomenological experience of the world is itself aesthetic. But Merleau-Ponty lacks Kant's independent discursive theory of validity for such judgements. If Schelling's Real-Idealismus is coherent, Merleau-Ponty's non-systematic mode either depends on speculative truth tacitly or needs independent justification. Merleau-Ponty's metaphorical core propositions ("flesh effects a dehiscence of its own mass") cannot simply be translated into austere logical form without loss. Against: Merleau-Ponty would say this demand assumes a pensée de survol. The circularity of metaphilosophy and first-order phenomenology may be "unavoidable and benign." If German Idealism's project of philosophical systematicity fails, then Merleau-Ponty (alongside Heidegger) "pick[s] up the pieces and warrantedly seek[s] to turn the classical project of philosophical systematicity inside out."

Key Findings

Merleau-Ponty's distinction of pre-objective and objective is emphatically not Kant's distinction of intuition and concept: pre-objective consciousness is not "blind" — it is intellectualism's error to suppose perception is meaningless without conceptual overlay (§2)
PP leaves a genuine gap regarding the sufficient conditions for objectivity; the Third Critique fills this gap from within Kant's own system (§2)
"Crystallization" replaces Kant's "purposivity for cognition": the becoming of objects is a lateral process within the perceptual field, neither active synthesis nor passive reception (§2, citing V&I p. 100)
Merleau-Ponty employs — "though not by name" — Schelling's concept of an indifference point in V&I pp. 137-138, 146-148 (§3)
Schelling's aphorism "nature is 'mind made visible' and mind 'the invisible nature'" asserts an identity that is "not simple" — it names a movement between two systems, not a conjunction of them (§3)
Merleau-Ponty's "inchoate style" is not deficiency but method: "austere logical formulations are... more remote from reality, for they fail to register its ambiguity, opacity, paradoxicality" (§4)

Methodology

Systematic rather than historical reconstruction. Gardner reads Merleau-Ponty through the lens of the Kant→Schelling development, not claiming Merleau-Ponty was inspired by a reading of the Third Critique or Schelling, but using these connections to "get a better understanding of Merleau-Ponty's solution to the transcendental problem."

Concepts Developed

pre-objectivity — the central concept of PP as Gardner reads it: the realm prior to objective thought, with properly transcendental status. Incorporates formal features (spatiality, motility, corporeality, temporality) without Kantian hylomorphism. Its proto-objective character is validated by the Third Critique's "hidden art of the imagination."
Crystallization — Merleau-Ponty's name for the lateral becoming of objects within the perceptual field, replacing Kant's "purposivity for cognition" (covered within pre-objectivity)
Philosophical aestheticism / para-aesthetic construal — Gardner's own proposal: phenomenological description is analogous to Kantian aesthetic judgement, a second-order relation that "raises up" and "re-presents" cognition (covered in source page only)

Concepts Referenced

chiasm — Gardner provides a six-element structural analysis and argues the parallel with Schelling's Real-Idealismus (§3)
flesh-as-element — "not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself" (V&I 146); "has no name in any philosophy" (V&I 147)
nonphilosophy — referenced via MP's 1961 Hegel lectures (§4)
fundamental-thought-in-art — the aesthetic dimension: Cézanne as paradigm of phenomenological expression; "the phenomenological world is... like art, the actualization of a truth" (PP lxxxiv)
precession — not directly discussed, but the "crystallization" concept and the Third Critique argument touch on the same problem of the ground preceding the cogito

Key Passages

"What distinguishes intentionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object is that the unity of the world, prior to being posited by knowledge through an explicit act of identification, is lived as already accomplished or as already there. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant himself demonstrated that there is a unity of the imagination and of the understanding, and a unity of subjects prior to the object..." (Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. lxxxi; cited §2)

"We have discovered that which is truly transcendental [...] These descriptions must be the opportunity for us to define an understanding and a reflection more radical than objective thought. To phenomenology understood as a direct description, a phenomenology of phenomenology must be added." (Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. 382; cited §4)

"The phenomenological world is not the making explicit of a prior being [...] but rather, like art, the actualization of a truth" (Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. lxxxiv; cited §4)

"Flesh is 'not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself'" (Merleau-Ponty, V&I, p. 146; cited §3)

"What we are calling flesh [...] has no name in any philosophy" (Merleau-Ponty, V&I, p. 147; cited §3 fn. 34)

"In Schelling's terms, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology may be interpreted as concerning itself with an experience of the identity of transcendental subjectivity with nature's productivity" (Gardner, §4)

"Perhaps the objection will be raised that a contradiction cannot be placed at the centre of philosophy, and that all of our descriptions, not being ultimately thinkable, are entirely meaningless." (Merleau-Ponty, PP, p. 382; cited §4)

"Merleau-Ponty arrives at nature by the opposite route from that of our contemporary naturalists: it is not because philosophical explanation requires an empirical character in order to be credible, but because whatever has an empirical character has so little value for philosophical reflection, that the subject must ultimately be thought to belong to nature (and that there must be such a thing as nature, as Merleau-Ponty conceives it)." (Gardner, §1)

"That there is a flesh of things, making vision possible, 'is no analogy or vague comparison and must be taken literally'" (Merleau-Ponty, V&I, p. 133; cited §4, fn. 50)

Schelling's postulate (Gardner's reconstruction, §3): "First posit either the I or Nature! Then follow through the conditions of possibility of whichever you have chosen to its final ground or, equivalently, to its final end. Whereupon you will find yourself positing the other disjunct. Now follow that through to its final ground or end. Observe that you now find yourself back where you started."

What's Not Obvious

The paper's central problematic is a hidden ground that can never appear within the perspective it grounds. This figure recurs across all four sections: Kant's "hidden art of the imagination" (§2), the unknown "supplement" needed for the transition from pre-objectivity to objectivity (§2), Schelling's Indifferenzpunkt that "cannot figure within either the transcendental perspective or that of Naturphilosophie" yet must be cognizable (§3), the chiasm's reflexive relation whose "fulfilment is necessarily elided" (§3), and MP's philosophical truth that "can only be apprehended and expressed" (§4). The paper does not name this recurring structure, but it is the unifying thread — and it connects to the wiki's visible-invisible concept: the invisible as the lining of the visible is precisely the hidden ground that never appears as such but conditions all appearance. See V&I p. 151: the invisibility of the world is "not merely 'de facto'" (cited §3, fn. 27).
Gardner tacitly reverses the standard genealogy of Merleau-Ponty's "metaphorical" language. The conventional reading treats MP's quasi-poetic style ("flesh effects a dehiscence of its own mass," "auscultation or palpation in depth") as a choice of rhetoric — a literary preference. Gardner shows it is a structural necessity: if phenomenological truth is analogous to aesthetic judgment (the para-aesthetic construal), then its expression must be analogous to artistic expression. "Austere logical formulations are... more remote from reality, for they fail to register its ambiguity, opacity, paradoxicality" (§4). This reversal — the "metaphorical" is closer to reality than the "literal" — is the paper's most consequential claim for how we read MP, yet it appears only in the final pages and is never flagged as a thesis. Footnote 50 provides the crux: "That there is a flesh of things, making vision possible, 'is no analogy or vague comparison and must be taken literally'" (V&I 133) — the passage where MP asserts the literalness of what reads as metaphor.
The paper's own argument enacts the aporia it diagnoses. Gardner argues that MP and Schelling are mirror images — each producing what the other claims is impossible. But the paper itself oscillates between systematic analysis (arguments 1-3, which reconstruct MP's position in Kantian terms) and an aesthetic-expressive register (argument 4, which acknowledges this reconstruction may betray what it captures). The paper does not resolve this oscillation and ends by saying "it is hard to see how the issue can be brought to a more definite conclusion" (§4). In other words, the paper about the MP-Schelling dilemma is itself a case of the dilemma. Footnote 56 contains the sharpest formulation: on A.W. Moore's Tractatus-influenced view, "the choice of Schelling or Merleau-Ponty can only be aesthetic."

Critique / Limitations

Gardner's reading is avowedly "selective, systematic rather than historical" — he does not claim Merleau-Ponty was inspired by the Third Critique or Schelling, which means the parallels are reconstructive and may impose a framework Merleau-Ponty would resist.
The paper's conclusion is deliberately inconclusive: it frames a dilemma (Wissenschaft vs. phenomenological expressivism) rather than resolving it. The "para-aesthetic" construal is offered as one option, not the definitive reading.
The engagement with Merleau-Ponty's late works (V&I, Nature lectures) is relatively thin compared to the detailed treatment of PP. The six-element chiasm analysis (§3) is concise but does not engage with the specific textual history of the concept as developed in the working notes.
Gardner notes that Merleau-Ponty's characterizations of Schelling in the Notes de cours are "highly tendentious" (§4, fn. 34), minimizing differences — but does not fully explore what Merleau-Ponty's own reading of Schelling looks like.
The comparison with Schelling's Real-Idealismus focuses on the 1800-1801 system; Schelling's later developments (positive philosophy, late metaphysical empiricism) receive only a footnote gesture (fn. 40 on Schelling's late "metaphysical empiricism" as an alternative reading).
Gardner charges Merleau-Ponty with a potential "reverse transcendental illusion" (§2): unwittingly reading proto-conceptual structure back into raw appearance. This charge — "the reverse of the error that Merleau-Ponty finds in Kantianism" — resurfaces at §4 but is never fully resolved. It deserves more attention than the paper gives it.
Important footnote material: fn. 22 notes that PP's naturans/naturata language (PP 382-383) merely "marks off what is inaccessible to objective thought," whereas V&I elucidates the relation "for its own sake" — a key genealogical point about the PP→V&I development. Fn. 30 notes that MP in 1956-57 returns to the CPJ in "Schellingian mode," now arguing it (1) "blurs" the subject-object correlation and (2) recognizes organic form as an epistemological alternative to object-construction. Fn. 35 notes that Real-Idealismus "appears moreover to meet Merleau-Ponty's conditions for 'good' ambiguity."

Connections

complements knight-2024-merleau-ponty-essence-of-nature — Knight reads the Merleau-Ponty/Schelling connection through tautegory, Naturphilosophie, and the elemental; Gardner reads it through Real-Idealismus, the Third Critique, and the transcendental problem. Both identify a deep structural parallel but emphasize different aspects.
contrasts with chouraqui-2016-order-of-the-earth — Chouraqui traces Merleau-Ponty's late ontology through Husserl's earth text and the Cartesian orders; Gardner traces it through Kant's Third Critique and Schelling. Both identify the passage from phenomenology to ontology but locate it differently.
extends the reading of friedrich-schelling — Real-Idealismus as the system whose structure the chiasm recapitulates
extends the reading of chiasm — six-element structural analysis; chiasm as "ultimate truth" (V&I 155)