The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness by Keith Whitmoyer

Author:Keith Whitmoyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Merleau-Ponty and the Tasks of Thinking
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

2. Time and the sense of life

Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on passive synthesis and the synthesis of transition culminate at the end of “Passivity and Activity,” where he turns briefly to what Heidegger called the “Zusammenhang des Lebens” or “cohesion of a life.”57 It seems that these reflections include some of the important lessons we can take away from La temporalité. For Merleau-Ponty the unity or coherence of life is not a function of a decision or even an act—not even the resolute determination to confront the terminus of one’s possibilities—but the “cohesion” of time in its lapse, passage and disarticulation. The unity of life is not given from the futurity of the closure of one’s possibilities but through life’s very passage and unfolding—through time’s eloquence, achieved precisely in its collapse and dehiscence. The coherence of a life, we could say, is thus the event of its own manifestation and becoming in and through time.58 While Heidegger stresses the thither end of Dasein’s life—its death—Merleau-Ponty, again following Husserl, shifts the emphasis to the opposite end—birth. As he notes:

Our birth, or, as Husserl has it in his unpublished writings, our “generativity,” founds both our activity or individuality, and our passivity or generality—that inner weakness [faiblesse] which prevents us from ever achieving the density of an absolute individual. We are not, in an incomprehensible manner, an activity joined to a passivity, an automatism surmounted by a will, a perception surmounted by a judgment, but wholly active and wholly passive, because we are the emergence [surgissement] of time.59

The event, or to use one of Merleau-Ponty’s preferred locutions, the advent of life’s cohesion is the becoming of something that affirms, as Merleau-Ponty says in “Cezanne’s Doubt,” “that there was something rather than nothing to be said.”60 The means for this adventure is not a pre-ordained reason, not an originative principle that gives shape to what is to come, but the becoming of temporality in its dual movement of articulation and disarticulation. The becoming of time is the ek-stase of life, its transcendence, and this transcendence is both the means for its unity and cohesion and the means of its dispersal and fragmentation that no resolution could outstrip. Because life and time have this form of becoming, there is no question of an opposition between an active, thetic consciousness, which organizes and orients the sense of the world, on one hand, and a passive body, itself merely an effect of external causal forces. Because the cohesion of our lives is nothing other than the cohesion of time in its becoming, we are, in a sense, both activity and passivity at once. Of course these remarks recall an oft quoted working note from The Visible and the Invisible in which Merleau-Ponty refers to Valéry’s thought about “a body of the spirit.” The passage reads:

new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being, they are connected onto the time that streams forth in us, supported on the pivots or hinges of our life,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.