A Truly Genetic Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty on Transcendental Contingency (Abstract)

A Truly Genetic Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty on Transcendental Contingency Genetic phenomenology, while appearing late in Husserl’s research program, constitutes the phenomenological starting point for many of his philosophical successors—including Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s project was initially static, aimed at uncovering the transcendental, essential, and universal features of human subjectivity (i.e. the characteristics that necessarily hold for any human subjectivity whatsoever). However, in his later work he hit upon the importance of the phenomenological study of the temporal development of human subjectivity itself. This program was extended further with the advent of generative phenomenology, in which Husserl was concerned with the development of the life-worlds of socio-cultural groups in addition to individual subjects. In this paper I explore the relationship between Husserl’s genetic and transcendental forms of phenomenology, contrasting this relationship with the one found in Merleau-Ponty’s adaptation of these Husserlian projects. I argue that the relationship between the genetic and the transcendental differs fundamentally in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. For Husserl, genetic phenomenology did not pose a challenge to the tenets of his transcendental project. It was, in sense, a way of filling out certain details that a strictly static-transcendental program simply does not attend to. A genetic approach might uncover necessary structures of the temporal unfolding of various phenomena—in which case it would be articulating transcendental laws of genesis. Alternatively, a genetic approach might uncover contingent structures of a lifeworld (e.g. those that emerge in particular cultures or social groups)—in which case it would not be articulating laws at all, but instead structures of meaning that do not exist at the level of the transcendental. In light of this, Husserl’s genetic approach either continued his transcendental project, or else it strayed from it—but in either case, it did not challenge it. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, took a much more radical approach to genetic phenomenology. In the course of his studies of psychopathology, neuropathology, and child development—studies that extended well beyond Husserl’s superficial familiarity with these domains—he concluded that many of the features of subjectivity that Husserl held as necessary and universal were in fact contingent and particular.1 He was forced to decide between holding to Husserl’s transcendental commitments or doing justice to the phenomena; he ultimately chose the latter. In so doing, Merleau-Ponty fundamentally reconceives the nature of the transcendental, developing an account of constitutive features of world-disclosure that are susceptible to development and disorder as the result of events in the very world they disclose. Where Husserl’s genetic phenomenology was layered over his transcendental phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s genetic phenomenology undermines and ultimately displaces Husserl’s transcendental project. What this amounts to, I argue, is a truly genetic phenomenology—one that seeks to do justice to the contingencies of human life rather than support a philosophical position that necessarily denies the profundity of both development and disorder.

1

Some Merleau-Ponty scholars, such as M. C. Dillon, have already developed the notion of a contingent transcendental. However, in many cases this notion is articulated as contingency in a priori concepts, rather than contingency in a priori structures of subjectivity. In this paper I argue for the latter articulation in my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s position.