Table Of ContentMaurice Merleau-Ponty
Translated, with an Introduction by
Signs
R I G H A RD C. M c C L E A RY
NoRTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
I 9 6 4
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Signes was first published by
Librairie Gallimard, Paris, in 1960.
Translation copyright © 1g64 by Northwestern University Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-19455
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 1964
Second Printing, 1969
Third Printing, 1972
Fourth Printing, 1975
Fifth Printing, 1977
ISBN: 0-8101-0253-6
τ R A N S L A Τ Ο R ' S
Preface
MAURICE MERLEAU-PoNTY was a phUosophcr who made
men wonder. Convinced that his thought had a role to play in present
history, he sought and found a journalistic and an academic audience,
yet scarcely tried to win a following. He was well enough known in the
cosmopolitan world he comments on in Signs, but the studied wall of
solitude he built about him made it hard for even intimates to know
him. Although he was more involved poHtically than his friend Sartre
when they founded Les Temps Modernes, and never stopped speaking
out for poUtical freedom and lucidity, his aesthetic fascination with the
visible and his metaphorical multiplication of perspectives subse
quently led Sartre to ask whether he had not adopted the politicaHy
ineffectual position of contemplating them aU without choosing any.
His former friends in the French Communist Party were more blunt,
calling him a dangerous idealist and challenging him to admit his
errors. Instead of snarling back, he confessed his differences with
apparent candor, kept insisting that the Communists be represented in
French political life, and then answered his accusers with disarming
questions of his ovm. He kept his distance.
Yet from that distance he made men wonder. His studied anonym
ity became at times intensely personal. He moved men. Seeing him as
their semblable, their frere, they saw into the mirror of themselves;
and what had been so conveniently remote and queer became as touch
ing, strange, and problematic as their own uncertain lives. They re
sponded to his indirect appeal to freedom and truth. Abandoned to the
primal wonders of their suddenly evasive world, they even turned in
awe and open adulation toward this "miracle," this "monster," for
support. He kept his distance, but now it was their distance too and
they communicated—obliquely.
This is the lot of the philosopher who seeks to be (as Merleau-
[ix]
X / S IGN S
Ponty in a self-revealing passage said Montaigne perhaps had learned
to be) simultaneously "ironic and solemn, faithful and free." Can he
also say without presumption that his lot should be every man's goal?
He knows his stage is a shifting world, which he sees according to his
own lights on the edge of the dark pit of non-sense, and that the very
brightness of his vision all too often blinds him to the darkness without
which his world would become invisible. If he tries to be a spy of God
who looks on high into the universal essence of mankind, he may
discover foolishly that he has lost the tie that links him to the world in
an "inextricable confusion," the carnal bond that is his only point of
contact with the universal. Ironically, he may be forced to recognize
that a remote pursuit of abstract objectivity has really made of him the
proud, narrow slave to the life-denying he once shrugged off as a blind
world's defensive caricature. Then the roles are reversed—the world
becomes the questioning philosopher.
But the true philosopher, in Merleau-Ponty's view, counts on such
reversals. He willingly admits that he is simply trying to express more
clearly the experience he shares with other men, who cannot put it into
words and yet are vital to his effort. Convinced that "it is easier to write
books than to live," he knows that men whose formal speech is blurred
can sometimes master in their style of life a tacit, universal language
which "speaks without saying." He knows that he may fail where they
succeed. Although he is indeed distinguished from his feUow men by
his awareness of the risk of reason and the need to take it, he can never
do without them. It is their quizzical awareness of his folIy which
provides him with what is perhaps his sole assurance—men do have an
idea of the truth, and only the exchange of mutual questioning can
ever hope to call it from its inarticulate shadows.
Merleau-Ponty is a wondering philosopher who tries to remain free
to pursue the "rumination" of his life without losing contact with its
source in the living present. Through the span of years we glimpse here
in Signs, we see him searching for himself by questioning his world.
We hear him learning "to speak with his own voice." Across the growing
distance which embodies him in history, he speaks from his time of his
times—difficult times, and less and less opportunity to questiofi them.
In the mature thought of Signs, time and distance mingle in the
shadow of approaching death. When the times are an agony, time itself
can be so. Yet in his Introduction, Merleau-Ponty can reproach his alter
ego Sartre for his despair, since he believes that there is only time and
(in the "calUngs and responses" of succeeding generations) always
time. There is no "new being"; it is like the "myth of the Androgynes."
No man is ever "wholly saved or damned." Since our only hope—hu-
Preface / хг
man questioning and creative response—is never wholly lost, "men
never should despair."
The hope and promise—and confusions—which arise from the
times and their crises are confirmed in Merleau-Ponty's own philoso
phy. His philosophy is a phenomenology. In its origins, its tasks and
goals, and its essential characteristics, it is inseparable from history
and time. It came to pass (but came to be) when Edmund Husserl
sought a way beyond the "crisis of the European sciences." According
to the classical thought in terms of which these sciences developed,
scientific concepts were the sole means of gaining objective knowledge
of phenomena and of the things which underlay them as the invariant
"order of nature." The "crisis of the European sciences" arose when
turn-of-the-century developments in mathematics and physics proved
to be incompatible with classical thought. In Husserl's view, this crisis
revealed the "artificial" character of the "scientific attitude" and the
need to seek the phenomenological origins of the classical ontology.
According to Husserl's central concept of "intentionality," there is al
ways an inseparable correlation between the "intentions" of "constitut
ing" consciousness—the source or origin of the meaning of our experi
ence—and the objective, "constituted" meaning-structures they intend
and are united in. Consciousness has constituted many "worlds" of
objective meaning-structures. Vietä, Galileo, and Descartes, in their
search for absolute and certain bases of all knowledge, constituted the
world of classical ontology. Since this ontology had proved untenable,
Husserl thought the classical search must be begun again on the basis
of the unreflected "natural" attitude of consciousness, from which the
special worlds constituted by our "theoretical" attitude arise.
Merleau-Ponty's first book, The Structure of Behavior, is an efFort to
explore the crisis in the classical foundations of the sciences of man.
According to the classical ontology of the judging subject and objective
things, the living body had become an object, other persons inferred
existences, and behavior a mechanical process in which a conscious
ness seated somehow "in" the body was acted upon causaUy by external
agents. This doctrine of the 'little man within man" implied that
consciousness is really the theoretical consciousness of the scientific
observer, the overarching viewer of the world who alone is not em
bodied in the system he observes. In the Husserlian tradition, but in
terms of the empirical findings of contemporary psychologies, Merleau-
Ponty tries to show that the classical doctrine and its underlying on
tology are not only inadequate to our effective experience of behavior,
but are in fact particular theoretical derivatives of it. Since all scientific
experience is only a more explicit form of a natural, perceptual experi
ence from which it arises but for whose appearance it cannot provide a
xii / S I N s
G
justification, there can be no "objective science of subjectivity." The
scientific universe is not a self-contained one, and our natural percep
tion is not an event in this universe.
Although this first work of Merleau-Ponty's might be considered
"theoretical philosophy," he has always tried to draw the vital as well as
the intellectual conclusions of an absolutist reason in a state of crisis.
His phenomenology does саП for a critical revision of an abstract
reason which endangers understanding by obscuring 'living reason,"
but it also demands awareness of the way in which a failure to revise
endangers Mving reasoners. For "the War did take place," and the place
that it took in the lives of the generation Merleau-Ponty speaks of still
with feeling in his Introduction to Signs was both enormous and ir
remediable. Whfie he was developing his academic thesis in The Struc
ture of Behavior, this generation slowly wove the web'of an "anonymous
adversity" which fell upon them with suffocating force with the Fall of
France. The subsequent events which wrenched them from their child
ish dreams of "strolling on the lawns of peace" and made them men,
and the revolutionary ambiance they Uved in during the Occupation,
led Merleau-Ponty to attempt to draw upon the thought of Marx as weU
as Husserl in his search for vital infrastructures. The crises of our
thought and history had taught him that "nature is not geometrical in
itself; it only seems so to a careful observer who sticks to macroscopic
data. Human society is not a community of reasonable minds; it was
only able to be understood as such in favored countries in which
economic and vital equilibrium had obtained locaUy for a while. The
experience of chaos, on the speculative level as on the other, invites us
to look at rationalism in an historical perspective from which it claimed
in principle to escape, to look for a philosophy which wül make us
understand the surging forth of reason in a world it has not made, and
which will prepare the vital infrastructure without which reason and
freedom become empty and decompose." As the essays published here
in Signs not only state but show, Merleau-Ponty's version of phenome
nology developed and defined itself through his "perpetual beginning"
of the effort to revive a Hving reason muffled in forgetfulness, a reason
which he thought had to be rendered present if our abstract calcula
tions and estabUshed ideologies were to make some sense within the
context of our total knowledge and experience.
In its insistence upon the ontological and epistemological primacy
of our perceptual experience, his philosophy was first and always a phe
nomenology of perception. Perception is the "primordial operation
which impregnates sensible being with a meaning, and which aU logi
cal mediation as weU as aU psychological causality presupposes."
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology tries to make us look at what we see,
Preface / xiii
and ask ourselves just what it means to see. In the process we are led to
ask ourselves as well just what it means to be incarnate in our times
and time—to have a history—and speak. His philosophy is a phenome
nology of "perception, history, expression." It is Husserl's celebrated
"return to the things themselves" as they appear contextually in our
pre-theoretical perceptual experience; that is, as "natural" meaning-
structures basic to our "artificial" logics—the structures which the
later Husserl called the "Logos of the aesthetic world." As Merleau-
Ponty summed it up in his Phenomenology of Perception, his is a
philosophy which has taken up the chaUenge offered by the crisis in the
classical foundations of Western thought "to return to the life-world
this side of the objective world; . . . to give the thing its concrete
physiognomy, to organisms their own manner of handling the world,
to subjectivity its historical inherence; to rediscover phenomena, the
layer of Uving experience through which others and things are first
given to us . . . ; to arouse perception and reveal the ruse by which it
lets itself be forgotten as a fact and as perception in favor of the object
lt reveals to us and of the rational tradition it founds."
Pursuing these aims in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-
Ponty shows that our fundamental and original perceptual experience
is always of "a world, that is . . . an indefinite and open multiplicity
in which relations are relations of reciprocal Implication. . . ." Our
perceptual "field of presence" is always structured in terms of objects
and their relatively but never fully constituted horizons, linked together
in a pre-objective order of their own by a constituting consciousness
"which makes explicit and thematizes what was previously presented
as only an undetermined horizon." Consciousness is always perspec-
tival and essentially incapable of the total synthesis of horizons which
would enable us to be aware of something from aU times and places—
that is, at the limit and as an example, from the overarching view
presupposed in the classical ontology. Yet as a consequence of reason's
"presumption" to a total synthesis, and of the "retrospective illusion" by
which we take the perceived objects constituted by our perceiving
consciousness as pre-existent causes of perception, we normally pass
from our experience of a world to that of "a universe, that is, of a
finished, explicit totality in which the relations are those of reciprocal
determination."
In Signs, the origins and consequences of our claim to bring our
world to total visibUity and rid it whoUy of its shadows are explored in
the behavioral sciences and psychoanalysis, in literature and painting,
in politics and history, and in phüosophy itself. For since in Merleau-
Ponty's thought it is perception which "opens" us to reality and forms
the basis for our understanding, reason's presumption to a total syn-
/ SIGNS
ihesis—the retrospective illusion by which our constituted universes
lead us to deny the life-world and the perceptual origins of all reason—
is the fundamental philosophic problem. In order to attempt to solve
this problem we must first describe the life-world we perceive and then
reflexively determine the essential meaning-structures of the self in its
relations to itself, to other persons, and to the world. The central
problem, Merleau-Ponty once said (and the other side, so to speak, of
the problem of reason's presumption), is to understand how we can
simultaneously constitute the meaning-structures of experience and
find that it is always already constituted in terms of meanings we have
not bestowed upon it. How is it that the past and the world (as the
horizons of our present) can be both immanent in our experience as a
matter of principle and as a matter of fact transcend it? In the Hus
serlian language of the Phenomenology of Perception, the central prob
lem is to understand how "I can be open to phenomena which go
beyond me, and which nevertheless exist only to the extent I take
them up and live them; how the presence to myself (Urpräsenz) which
defines me and conditions all alien presence is at the same time de-
presentation (Entgegenwärtigung) and throws me outside myself."
Through its very efforts to establish the essential structures of the
reflective presence of the self to itself which forms the basis of all
thought, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception necessarily be
comes a dialectical philosophy of existence. For this experiencing of
the world as always already constituted yet always still to be constituted
by our active and spontaneous involvement in it is precisely what it
means to him to "exist," to "be present to the world" as an "existential
field." Sometimes Merleau-Ponty speaks of "existence" in terms of the
nonrepresentational, implicit "operating" intentionality of pre-objective
consciousness; sometimes in terms of the explicit intentions and crea
tive acts in which we represent and then assume our situation by our
projects and commitments. But it is always what he calls a "thought in
act"-our unending assumption of already constituted facts and haz
ards in a meaning-giving act of constitution which does not exist
before or without that assumption. Existential self-awareness is aware
ness that our consciousness in essence is involvement in an already
meaningful world as the creative negation of it, which is to say that it
is the dialectic of assumption and transcendence of an existential field
of presence which transforms the meaning-structures of that field.
To understand the essence of consciousness and the experiential
meaning-structures it constitutes and is constituted by, we must there
fore understand our existence as temporal beings. Consciousness is
essentially the intentional transcendence of a field of presence toward
another, future field of presence. Time is essentially the vector or
Preface / ocv
polarization which characterizes the intentionality of consciousness.
Consequently, the basis for whatever has a meaning or (more pre
cisely) "makes sense" is temporality. The characteristic common to aU
the usages of "sense"—perception, direction, meaning, understanding
_-is for Merleau-Ponty just this constituting, meaning-giving inten
tional transcendence.
Like every other being, the self exists, takes place, or comes to be as
a "temporalization." It is a being which expresses itself and makes
itself be what it is in intention in a single gesture of existence which
takes up the past, incorporates it into the present, and links this present
to a future. In so doing, it opens a whole cycle of time in which
"acquired" meanings wiU remain present as dimensions of experience
that (at least "for a time") do not have to be called into question.
Although reason's presumption and the retrospective fflusion tend to
obscure the fact, such "objective" time and being clearly have their
roots in an historical time and an intentional being—the 'living pres
ent . . . torn between a past which it takes up and a future it pro
jects." Time and being become present only from a certain point of
view through the intentionality of consciousness. Since the world and
things are thus the linking of perspectives, they exist only as lived and
constituted by some subject.
Yet they simultaneously transcend all perspectives precisely be
cause this linking is temporal and thus leaves horizons of undeter
mined or 'latent" meaning which I have not constituted. In fact, they
have not been constituted by any subject, in the sense that aU men are
embodied in a natural world and time which they are not the authors
of. "The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who
is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable
from the world, but from a world which he himself projects." As
Merleau-Ponty points out in Signs, the "presence to myself which de
fines me and conditions aU alien presence" is simultaneously presence
to a compresent world which always bears me "somewhere else" and so
requires me to assume once more the search to constitute the bases of
my thought and existence. 'There is time for me only because I am
situated in it, that is, only because I find myself already committed in
it, only because not aU of being is given to me in person, and finally,
only because a sector of being is so close to me that it is not even
spread out in front of me and I cannot see it, as I cannot see my face.
There is time for me because I have a present. . . . It is in communi
cating with the world that we communicate with ourselves." There is
time and meaning for me only because I am incarnate.
Since we are fundamentaUy and originally conscious of our world
and times only because we are literaUy and metaphysicaUy "embodied"
