On Phenomenological Jargon, or, this might help with Merleau-Ponty

(Clearly, I'm prepping texts in the order I gave you over the weekend.)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher, the most important philosopher of embodiment.

Once again, wikipedia to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

Every time I read the Preface to The Phenomenology of Perception (which happens with embarrassing frequency) I forget just how packed full of awful phenomenological jargon it is. I'm always left with this feeling of luscious philosophy; but while I'm in the middle of it, I'm continually surprised at how much work it takes to unpack some of those sentences. (The funny thing is, this Preface was the very first phenomenological text I ever read, and still found it to be completely accessible and voluptuous.) For our purposese here: don't bother. Latch on to what resonates, move past the jargon.

The basic gist of this piece of writing is this: Phenomenology is philosophy dedicated to the most accurate description of the world possible, and all the method and jargon are in the service of this very accurate description. No, for serious. Despite the awful words like "eidetic" and "reduction" and "positing" and "natural attitude," this description, like those of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, Cézanne, is and must be filled with equal parts attentiveness and wonder (and a dash of jargon, I suppose). This philosophy does not start with doubt, but realizes that doubt is the negation of a world always "already there": "We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive the world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive" (xviii). And so that philosophy must concern itself with perception, and in perception find our only way of being open to and present to the world in which we find ourselves. In phenomenology, we find in ourselves not an "inner core of our being," but rather, paraphrasing (!!!) Merleau-Ponty, we find ourselves destined for the world. In order to make this available to reflection, we must cultivate attentiveness to the world, and wonder at the world. Phenomenology does so in the guise, almost, of art. (Merleau-Ponty speaks of the "art of imagination" as being necessary.) The description we arrive at will never exhaust ourselves, or the world. Human finiteness and human unknowingness are identical. It is our condition to be finite, and to be unknowing about ourselves and the world. It is the world's essence to be inexhaustible--that is, also, mysterious. We cannot know ourselves fully; we cannot know the world fully. Phenomenological description will not only acknowledge this, but move toward it, embrace it. It strains at limits of philosophical langauge, it attempts to say what cannot be said forthrightly. If this is the source of a veritable explosion of jargon, it is also the deep kinship of phenomenological philsophy and art: it attempts to bring into being an experience of the world which is not expressible in language. Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher who best understands this.

Of course, this Merleau-Ponty is buried alongside obscurity both jargonistic and merely obscure. As always, move through that which you cannot follow, and get to those moments where what he is saying resonates somehow with you.

For now, I'll leave you with th is. Look for this post to be updated to redact a little of what Merleau-Ponty is after, some cutting through the bullshitty jargon. (Just be glad I didn't assign Husserl himself. I almost did. For serious.)