The Primal Scream: Re-Reading the “Temporality” Chapter of Phenomenology of Perception in the Context of Negative Philosophy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

I recommend the article be published but I do wish to suggest that the editors and the author consider a number of corrections to address some of the concerns I outline below. 

 

The article has several merits: it is written lucidly and a pleasure to read. The author is obviously experienced in reading Merleau-Ponty’s work and up to date on the scholarship, and they do have a personal voice in which they do so. 

 

The main contribution of the article is to propose a substitution of the pair being-nothingness with the pair articulate-inarticulate. I am ambivalent about whether this is a substantial contribution. The first worry has to do with the metaphorical language of “articulatedness.” It is always hard to verify that a lexical substitution does any philosophical work, but even more so when the substitute is a metaphor, which needs external resources to be understood properly. It seems to me the article could do more to explain what changes when we move to the language of articulatedness. In particular, the article is ambivalent about the status of opposition. The main argument against the language of being and nothingness has to do with Merleau-Ponty’s well-known rejection of Parmenideanism. But if this is so, substitution is not the solution: for the problem with Pamenideanism is double: first, as the author acknowledges, it is false because it assumes that there is such a thing as self-identity (of being and of nothingness) and second, as is more implicit in the article, is the fact that Parmenideanism is committed to a certain sense of difference: namely that the difference between being and nothingness is radical and therefore that they can never meet. If this is so, replacing one pair with another doesn’t do the trick, because what needs changing is not the terms, but the relation between them. The article seems ambivalent about this. We would need a better account of how the inarticulate and the articulate are not radically different (probably they are different in degrees only, but this has retroactive consequences on the author’s ability to use it to deal with retention and protention), and importantly, a better account of the relations between parts that obtain within articulatedness: what kind of difference obtains between parts if articulatedness is a certain configuration of parts? 

 

In general, as regards the main point about articulatedness, it seems to me that this can be made into a usable contribution only once the author gives an account of articulatedness and disarticulatedness as differences of degrees, probably mobilising the notions of institution and sedimentation (ignored in the paper), and take into account how this pairing doesn’t replace the being/nothingness pairing because it changes the relations between the terms of the paring. In particular, Merleau-Ponty claims that absolute articulatedness is impossible, but if it existed, it would amount to nothing, just like absolute inarticulatedness would. This is different from the relations between being and nothingness of absolute being is not nothingness and absolute nothingness is not being. It may be that the author precisely intends this substitution to upset the relations between the terms too, but then this is hardly a substitution and not enough is made to show that the pairing articulatedness/disarticulatedness competes favourably with the pairing being/nothingness. It is fairly clear how the first doesn’t run into problems posed by the second, but not how it addresses the same issues, or preserve the advantages of the latter.

 

Related to the unclarity about what exactly the contribution of the piece is, is the lack of engagement with Kaushik. Although the author mentions his work (ft 1, 16, 20), they do not use it to clarify what their own view is, whether it opposes, furthers, or modifies Kaushik and why. A more explicit contrast from Kaushik would help the text find its centre I think.

 

Relatedly, the article sometimes seems to not depart resolutely enough from Parmenideanism. On page 7, which is crucial for the rest of the argument, the author argues that a better account of time would make it “negative” on the basis that the Parmenidean account makes it “positive” and that Parmenideanism should be rejected. But Merleau-Ponty would be the first to point out that the opposite of positive is negative only in the Parmenidean framework. In other words, the author’s move from a positive to a negative account of time remains too Parmenidean and not Merleau-Pontian enough. In fact, it seems the author is aware of this, although not in any explicit manner, for they quickly (and apparently unwarrantedly) move from calling their account of time “negative” to calling it an account “from nothingness” to an account of time as an “exchange of nothingness and being.” This gradual softening is for good reason, but it doesn’t follow from the preceding argument against Parmenideanism.  

 

There are some issues to do with signposting:

-First, the article presents itself as a reflection on negation in Merleau-Ponty. In fact, it is a reflection on the relations between the three extases of time. This is confusing to the reader but it also has another consequence: the article opens with the argument that such an account is necessary because it is absent in Merleau-Ponty. This can be disputed: as the author themselves comes close to acknowledging, the relations between being and nothingness in Merleau-Ponty has been the object of many interpretations that focus on the relations of the visible and the invisible (as well as, to a lesser extent, sense and nonsense and philosophy and non-philosophy) This may not satisfy the author but it is different from saying that no treatment is forthcoming. Whatever the case may be, the theme of the unfolding of time, which is the real focus of the paper, has also been the object of many studies. So it seems to me that the claim for novelty is overdone here. 

 

-Secondly, and maybe related to this unclarity of focus, the article seems to have one introduction, one conclusion and two parts, which seem constructed as sub-parts. It is quite hard to see how they are distinct from each other, and how they build on each other. The intro and the conclusion do not help in this, as they in fact, offer no mapping, no announcement or recap of the argument. To be blunt, there is no conclusion.

 

-Line 107 has the beginning of an enumeration that seems interrupted. 

 

I also wish to draw the author’s attention to a few conceptual points that are more limited and may or may not have a bearing on the larger argument: 

 

-The author’s reading of Augustine on page 5 (and footnote 7) is insufficient: on the very bases of the texts from the Confessions that the author uses (as well as throughout his work including the City of God and de Trinitate), Augustine’s effort is to avoid the problems related to the Parmenidean-Eleatic account of time, by distinguishing presence (which the past, the present and the future can all possess) and present in the temporal sense. This is not the same as saying that only the present “exists,” since he makes use of two sense of existence (to this extent he distances himself from Eleatism) and therefore that he thinks of time positively. 

 

-Point 2) in lines 241-242 seem a false characterisation of Eleatism, in fact, a Manichean one: for the Eleatic view, being and nothingness are not “equiprimordial,” since nothingness has no attributes. 

 

-The gloss on the quotation from Eye and Mind on line 254 struck me as probably quite mistaken (but this may be open to argument), it is at least insufficiently contextualised. The author seems to do two things with this passage. First, they seem to take it to mean that at the ontological level, being and nothingness are unified or blended, hardly distinguishable. Although this raises more problems than it solves this is borne out by the text. Secondly, it takes it to explain how their difference remains nonetheless structural for being (that the world would not appear if there weren’t such differences between the more articulate and the less articulate) by referring to another metaphor: breathing. But this metaphor is not meant to offer a solution or an account of how this is so, simply to show that it is so. If the author’s claim is that their emphasis on articulatedness and disarticulatedness is corroborated by other metaphorical passages, then they are right. But if they mean this passage to provide an account of how the relevant ontology works, the reference to breathing does no work towards this. The rest of this passage is difficult for reasons related to this: the author seems to suggest that disarticulatedness and articulatedness interact by way of time. But the rest of the paper makes the opposite claim: that time can be explained in terms of the relations between articulatedness and disarticulatedness. 

 

Author Response

Thank you so much for your comments and careful reading of this essay. I appreciate your insights, and have attempted to revise the document accordingly. 

I've re-framed the inquiry to focus more on temporality and less on a Merleau-Pontian account of negativity as such. I've added text to clarify some of the sections noted in the comments. I've also re-framed the issue to foreground questions about the continuity/discontinuity of MP's thought per the issue's theme. 

Thanks again for your time and efforts look at my work. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thank Philosophies, the editorial creativity and philosophical arc of the guest editor - Glen Mazis, and the author of this submission for their efforts in rethinking the philosophical legacy and contemporary importance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in terms of his later works, lectures and the current research trajectory on his thought. In consideration of the essay under review, “The Primal Scream: Re-reading the “Temporality” Chapter of Phenomenology of Perception in the Context of Negativity,” I recommend its publication with revisions, which I detail below.

The abstract and opening of the paper insightfully discerns a genuine problem with the secondary literature on Merleau-Ponty, i.e., the dearth of work interrogating notions of negativity and negation in Merleau-Ponty’s thought despite the centrality of his critique of Sartre in his own thought and his readings of Hegel, Marx, and I would add, Freud and Hyppolite, in (especially) his later thought. The first footnote of the essay details the “passing” treatment of these ideas in the secondary literature. Yet, in the abstract and in the essay’s opening salvo, the author repeats an aspect of the occlusion the essay purports to disclose by conflating the notions of negation and negativity together, using them synonymously in the history of western philosophy and thusly, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. This fundamental move plagues the coherence of the immediate characterization of the history of thought in collapsing the so-called “Hegelio-Sartrean account of negativity” to the “Eleactic-Platonic concept of negation” (p. 2), that also includes Aristotle, Augustine and Heidegger, in moving negativity/negation to an account of “time and sense-genesis” in Merleau-Ponty (p. 2). The author suggests it is only through Merleau-Ponty’s “negative conceptive of time” that his theory of negativity is revealed as distinct from what he calls a “positive concept of time” (p. 2). Here we see that the conflation of negation and negativity enable a collapsing of Hegel and Sartre to Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle and Augustine. The scope makes Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre and nihilation in The Visible and Invisible and his notion of “hyper-dialectic” nonsensical. Thus, it is no surprise these important moments in his thought are entirely missing from this essay. The confusion determinative of the essay is quite clear on p.2 when the author suggests:

…I try to show that the account of negativity proposed—negativity understood as a double negation, “not-nothing,” does not sufficiently address the “bad dialectic” of the Hegelio-Sartrean tradition since it arguably does not (sufficiently) disrupt the asserted purity of being and nothingness. In place of an understanding of negativity as double negation, “not-nothing,” I suggest we understand Merleau-Ponty’s theory in terms of “articulation” and “disarticulation,” as a movement of integration and disintegration. This movement, furthermore, is what is proposed in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of time, not only in Phenomenology of Perception but appears consistently even through The Visible and the Invisible.

Negativity is not the same as “a double negation,” which confuses the issue of determinate negation or the negation of negation that (again) Merleau-Ponty addresses in his separate redresses of Sartre and Hegel (as well as in the course notes on Hyppolite, which the author is familiar with as he cites them). By moving quickly to the problem of temporality by way of “Hegelio-Sartreanism” the author is able to assert the claim that they both suffer a “purity of being and nothingness” and in doing so avoids the problem of history, (self) consciousness, and contingency both thinkers are grappling with. (This may also be why the author mentions Marx but never returns to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on Marx). Moreover, suggesting articulation/disarticulation or integration/disintegration in terms of movement misses the assumptions of movement in terms of negativity (because the author collapses the claim into a positionality of time that is more influenced by Augustine read through Parmenides (or Critchley’s reading of Heidegger), e.g., the claim that “being is” cannot admit change (p. 6). Note: the 19^th century thinkers Feuerbach and Hegel, who have suggested formation and deformation (or, as Merleau-Ponty cites, Malraux’s ‘coherent deformation’) are not addressed in their difference from the author’s own idea of articulateness and disarticulateness. The issue is especially relevant as the paper easily moves from time to language to sense-genesis.

The claim to movement is obscured ontologically by the shift to temporality that seems to find difference as always located in terms of articulation and negative dissonance, i.e., as silence and madness (non-sense) guaranteed against an appeal to eloquence or articulateness, which is arguably, a moment of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s account of speech. The author asserts the diacritical moment in expression as directly translatable to the (indirect) ontological level they are discussing – without problematizing the specificity of this moment. It would be helpful to do this work in the beginning in order to make the move to “eloquence” clearer.

Again, this is important and helpful work. I am suggesting these clarifications in the beginning of the paper would substantially help the force of the paper in moving toward its conclusion.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your time and effort reviewing this essay. I've revised the text in order to more adequately address the concerns raised.

I've re-written the Introduction in an effort to more clearly frame the work, added clarificatory text to the body, and added to the conclusion. I've especially focused on clarifying the sense of "negativity" and its difference from "negation."

Thanks again for taking the time to read this.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a resubmission, I have reviewed the corrections and although the author has been selective in their attention to my suggestions, I think it can be accepted.