Nathaniel Hawthorne spent three periods of his life in Concord, Massachusetts among a group of friends and neighbors called Transcendentalists. He and his wife Sophia first moved to Concord on 9 July 1842, the day of their wedding, and stayed more than three years at the Old Manse until October 1845, when they moved to Salem. These years are often described by biographers as idyllic, a long honeymoon in Paradise. Hawthorne cultivated this impression through his letters, notebooks, “The Old Manse” sketch, and stories such as “The New Adam and Eve.”He left Concord in desperate financial straits, but after living in Salem, Lenox, and West Newton, Hawthorne returned to Concord as the famous author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and from May 1852 to July 1853, he lived in a house on the east side of town purchased from the Alcotts, which they called The Hillside and he renamed The Wayside. In 1860, after spending seven years abroad in England and Italy, Hawthorne returned to Concord and The Wayside once more, where he lived until his death in May 1864. He chose not to die there among his family, however, going instead on a trip with his friend Franklin Pierce, who was with him during his final hours in a New Hampshire inn where they had stopped for the night. In The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne, in the voice of his narrator Coverdale speaking of Hollingsworth, anticipated this end when he declared “Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die! . . . How many men, I wonder, does one meet with, in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his death-bed companions!” (iii: 39).

In this 1853 proclamation, Charles Dickens articulates the nineteenthcentury belief in the importance of fancy in books for children that has remained a guiding assumption about children's literature ever since. “The fairy literature of our childhood,” according to Dickens, significantly affords a “precious old escape”from the world which “is too much with us, early and late.” This is why he objects to his friend George Cruikshank writing temperance messages into fairy tales; Dickens would keep social and political agendas outside the realm of fancy. It might seem odd, then, that he expressly associates fancy and romance with the very worldly institution of nationalism. But the Dickensian defense of fancy astutely recognizes the imaginative character of nationalism: like fairy tales, nations seem to exist independently of the local concerns and interests of their citizens. Nations garner fealty from their inhabitants by convincing them to believe in and find refuge in realms beyond themselves, realms apart from immediate experience.

The fairy stories that Dickens and his contemporaries were writing for juvenile readers thus schooled them in the imaginative dynamics of nationalism. One of those contemporaries in the United States – Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852) – had already identified the crucial role of fancy in nationalism in such 1830s stories as “The Gray Champion” and “Legends of the Province- House.” But Hawthorne from the start saw nationalism not merely as a realization of fancy in which a powerful sense of nation and the practices that strengthen, expand, and perpetuate a nation emanate from a fanciful sensibility. For Hawthorne, any investment that persons develop in places and pasts, in specific countries and histories, proceeds imaginatively. Since nationalism, like other human formations, owes its existence to the imaginative faculty, it registers rather than rationalizes (either positively or negatively) the function of imagination.

“Marvelous”

The House of the Seven Gables is obsessed with law. In his preface, setting out the distinction between novels and romances, Hawthorne associates the former with realism, in which imagination, denied the possibility of fanciful transformation, becomes enslaved to “the probable and ordinary course of man's existence.”Romance, on the contrary, need not “rigidly subject itself to laws,” but, demonstrating “a very minute feeling”for “the possible,” is able “to mingle the Marvelous” (ii: 1) with the probable events of everyday life. “Law” functions here for Hawthorne on several levels. Most immediately, he means “convention,” the things “normal” people expect to happen in a “typical” day, life lived, not as a possibility for invention, but within the comfort of predictable pattern. Yet Hawthorne also attaches convention to more recognizable legal constructs, such as contracts: the preface itself takes on a contractual tone, establishing the terms that, if readers agree to them, will enable the romance to be understood and enjoyed. Hawthorne also invokes the legal protection of property, “by laying up a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air” (ii: 3). In the preface, then, Hawthorne attaches the juridical functions of law (the contractual protection of property rights) to the conventions of everyday life (the predictable life-patterns carried out, presumably, within the privately owned home), both laws represented in the plot by the officious, grasping, and literal-minded lawyer, Jaffrey Pyncheon.

The second saying, by Merleau-Ponty, represents the culmination of an argument whose effect was to undo the state of thraldomdescribed in the first saying, taken from the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein.

The picture that held us captive was that of a mediational epistemology. I mean by that an understanding of the place of mind in a world such that our only knowledge of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. The initial statement of this structuring picture is found in Descartes, who at one point declares himself “certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me” (assuré que je ne puis avoir aucune connaissance de ce qui est hors de moi, que par l'entremise des idées que j'en ai eues en moi). This picture sets up a certain distinction between inside and outside (we can call it the I/O picture), which continues to reverberate through the tradition. The basic idea of a mediational epistemology is expressed by the preposition “through” (par l’interm´ediaire de, in this Cartesian formulation).We grasp the world through something, what is outside through something inner.

A measure of the remarkable influence of Cartesian dualismis found in the fact that it often constrains even the ways in which it is rejected. Few accept, it is true, the basic picture of a dualism of mental and physical substances. A dualism still shapes the philosophy of mind, however – for instance, in that almost everyone sees as central the task of figuring out the relation between mind and body. It sometimes seems as if the only possible accounts of human beings consist in either giving a mental or a physical description, or explaining how the mental descriptions and the physical descriptions relate to one another.

Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, argues that no such variation, played out on the Cartesian register, will ever account for the human mode of being in the world. “There are two classical views,” he notes;

CHALLENGING COMPANIONS

In The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Rhiannon Goldthorpe entitles her essay on aesthetics and politics “Understanding the Committed Writer.” Similarly can we entitle this essay in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, although there is a difference. Whereas Sartre strives to be a committed writer as philosopher, playwright, and political “man of action,”Merleau-Ponty strives to be an engaged philosopher. Whereas, from Merleau- Ponty's perspective, Sartre thinks about commitment as neutral between roles, Merleau-Ponty regards engagement as role-dependent. Whereas Sartre thinks about commitment as one's taking sides in politics, Merleau-Ponty argues for the philosopher's engagement with truth. Characteristically, Merleau-Ponty writes, “One must be able to withdraw and gain distance in order to become truly engaged, which is, also, always an engagement with the truth” (EP 60-1/60).

This essay is about Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong intellectual companionship with Sartre. It is also about the challenging companionship between the politician, the philosopher, the playwright, and the painter. Most specifically, it is about how Merleau-Ponty allowed his engagement as philosopher to determine and reflect his engagement with politics and the arts.

With the 1995 publication of the notes to Merleau-Ponty's three lecture courses on the subject of nature, scholars of the philosopher have been given a treasure trove of material with which to make sense of the “ontological turn”in his late thinking and to reconstruct the possible trajectory and potentially radical implications of what, by the necessity of accident, became his final work. These notes, assembled under the collective title Nature, bring together materials from the lecture courses of 1956-7, 1957-8, and 1959-60, respectively titled “The Concept of Nature,”“The Concept of Nature: Animality, the Human Body, Passage to Culture,” and “The Concept of Nature: The Human Body.”

The importance of these lecture notes goes well beyond their contribution of a wealth of material relevant to Merleau-Ponty's final project, fragments of which are presented in The Visible and the Invisible. Indeed, the broad claim I want to make in this chapter is that Merleau-Ponty’s confrontation with the biological sciences of his day, not unlike his earlier engagement with Gestalt theory, psychology, and physiology (in both The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception), furnished him with the means necessary tomake a crucial philosophical breakthrough: just as his early turn to science allowed him, through a kind of immanent analysis, to discover the incarnate experience of the body as the necessary implication of its scientific objectification, so, too, did his later engagement lead immanently to the discovery of a properly philosophical concept of embodied life necessarily situated beneath the division between consciousness and body, thought and extension, memory and matter.

THE SITUATION OF THE PHILOSOPHER

Is the philosophy of our age, Sartre asks, dead or alive? Must we cultivate the field or raze the moldering edifice? Yet thought rejects stark choices of this kind. We know full well that Marx did not demolish Hegel, that Kant did not leave Cartesianism in ruins. How could a serious assessment of Marxism be captured in a simple verdict? Consider instead what Merleau-Ponty tells us in the Introduction toSigns:

Or again: “We are saying that a reexamination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic, and that it could not possibly terminate in a nihil obstat or a listing on the Index” (S 16–17/10–11).

I would like to begin with a passage from Derrida's Speech and Phenomena. It concerns the parallel Husserl establishes between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology. For Husserl, the domain of pure psychological experience has the same scope as the whole domain of transcendental experience. There is, however, an irreducible difference between these two fields inasmuch as the domain of phenomenological psychology refers to the subject as part of the world, that is, as existing empirically, whereas transcendental phenomenology concerns a consciousness that is not threatened by the destruction of the world and that is therefore the condition of the possibility of the world qua phenomenon.

This is why Derrida writes that this irreducible difference between transcendental and empirical consciousness is nonetheless “nothing.” For in fact nothing – at any rate, nothing that can be defined in the natural or ontical sense – distinguishes transcendental from empirical consciousness. Yet they can in no way be conflated. So, the notion of a parallel, used by Husserl, is indeed apt because two parallel lines are identical; they are no different geometrically, yet they are not the same line. Like parallel lines, empirical and transcendental consciousness are at once very near and very far from one another.

This passage comes from the opening pages of “The Philosopher and His Shadow,”Merleau-Ponty's essay on Edmund Husserl. It proposes a risky interpretive principle. The main feature of this principle is that the seminal aspects of a thinker's work are so close to him that he is incapable of articulating them himself. Nevertheless, these aspects pervade the work; give it its style, its sense, and its direction; and therefore belong to it essentially. As Martin Heidegger writes, in a passage quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the essay, “The greater the work of a thinker – which in no way coincides with the breadth and number of writings – the richer is what is unthought in this work, which means, that which emerges in and through this work as having not yet been thought.” The goal of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, he says, is “to evoke this unthought-of element in Husserl’s thought” (S 202/160).

The risk of such an interpretive strategy is evident. By identifying the essence of a thinker’s work with ideas that he never explicitly endorsed, indeed, by allowing for the possibility that the ideas he did explicitly endorse are in contradiction with the essence of his thought, the interpreter runs the risk of recklessness. Yet there is something to the strategy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most original and important philosophers of the past century. Yet in many ways the full scope of his contribution is becoming clear only now, more than forty years after his death. His impact on philosophy, psychology, and criticism has been enormous, although his intellectual reputation was initially somewhat overshadowed - first by the greater notoriety of his friend Jean-Paul Sartre and then by structuralism and poststructuralism in the latter half of the century. As a result, in part due to his premature death, Merleau-Ponty's presence in contemporary intellectual life has remained strangely elusive. His influence has cut across disciplinary boundaries, yet it has tended to move beneath the surface of mainstream scholarly and popular intellectual discourse.

As a result, perhaps understandably, academic and nonacademic readers alike have been slow to appreciate the real depth and significance of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which cannot be neatly pigeonholed in familiar conceptual or historical categories. He was a phenomenologist above all, yet he differed in fundamental ways from the three other major phenomenologists, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Unlike these philosophers, Merleau-Ponty availed himself of empirical data and theoretical insights drawn fromthe biological and social sciences, although he was not a psychologist, a linguist, or an anthropologist. He could fairly be called an existentialist, although that label has come to seem less and less informative in hindsight, embracing as it did such a disparate array of literary and intellectual figures.

The English-language reception of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body focuses mainly on two texts, Phenomenology of Perception and the posthumous The Visible and the Invisible. In the former, he interrogates the body as a site of mobility and spatiality, arguing that these fundamentally corporeal ways of relating to the world subtend and structure the intentionality of consciousness. In the latter work, the doctrine of intentionality is further displaced by a concept of the flesh, understood as a relation of tactility that precedes and informs intersubjective relations, necessarily disorienting a subject centered account. The flesh is not something one has, but, rather, the web in which one lives; it is not simply what I touch of the other, or of myself, but the condition of possibility of touch, a tactility that exceeds any given touch, and that cannot be reducible to a unilateral action performed by a subject. The most extended and controversial discussion of touch takes place in the final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining,”although that text, posthumously published and unfinished in many ways, can only suggest the radical challenge to a subject-centered conception of intentionality. Something is prior to the subject, but this “something” is not to be understood on the model of a substance.

In opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation. He marshals convincing phenomenological evidence that higher primates and human beings learn to act skillfully without acquiring mental representations of the skill domain and of their goals. He also saw that no brain model available at the time he wrote could explain how this was possible. I argue that now, however, there are models of brain function that show how skills could be acquired and exercised without mind or brain representations.

THE FAILURE OF REPRESENTATIONALIST MODELS OF THE MIND

The cognitivist, Merleau-Ponty’s intellectualist opponent, holds that, as the learner improves through practice, he abstracts and interiorizesmore andmore sophisticated rules. There is no phenomenological or empirical evidence that convincingly supports this view, however, and, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the flexibility, transferability, and situational sensitivity of skills makes the intellectualist account implausible.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is best known as a philosopher of science for his detailed investigations of psychology. Perhaps because of this, the significance of his work for a broader philosophical reflection on science has been overlooked, but Merleau-Ponty intended his work as a general investigation of the epistemological and ontological status of meaning and structure. The structures discovered through research in solid-state physics or molecular biology must be included within the scope of his inquiry as much as the more primary perceptual structures of color or visual depth. It is true he often insisted that science cannot account for or understand a particular phenomenon and went on to contrast his phenomenological discoveries with the inadequate analyses produced by science. When Merleau-Ponty spoke of “science” in this way, however, he used the term interchangeably with “objective thought.” The task remains to show that scientific investigation can also be freed from the traditional prejudices of objective thought and exhibited as a mode of human existence. Merleau-Ponty was admittedly ambivalent about this possibility, and he rarely thematized scientific research in the course of his investigations. The aim of this chapter, however, is to develop an existential conception of science within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s work. It seems clear to me that his project cannot be completed unless it incorporates science, and not just the body and the perceived world, poetry and history, painting and love.

Merleau-Ponty's interconnected critiques of empiricism and intellectualism run like a double helix through the pages of Phenomenology of Perception. In the decades since its publication in 1945, philosophical and psychological theories of perception have continued to take for granted empiricist and intellectualist models and metaphors, although their respective claims to preeminence have tended to swing to and fro in unpredictable ways. As a result, although the current state of play in the philosophy of mind for us today differs widely from what it was for Merleau-Ponty in the middle of the last century, neither would he find it altogether unrecognizable. His objection to the empiricist concept of sensation (or “sense data” or “qualia”), for example, is likely to strike contemporary readers as familiar and plausible, thanks in part to arguments advanced in a roughly kindred spirit by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfrid Sellars, and Thomas Kuhn. To launch an attack on intellectualism as Merleau-Ponty does, by contrast, might look more like tilting at windmills, or beating a dead rationalist horse, or perhaps just failing, understandably enough, to anticipate the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology that took place after his death in 1961.

“Every theory of painting is ametaphysics,”declares Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” his last major philosophical essay on the visual arts (OE42/171/132). The immediate target of his remark is Descartes, in whose brief comments on engravings Merleau-Ponty finds a denigration of art as but a handmaiden to perception, capable of disclosing only those features of the mind-independent world already available to ordinary vision. However, his claim is meant to apply much more broadly. By addressing the nature of representation, its content, means, and ends, and the relation of the artist to the world, a theory of painting entails a metaphysics: a conception of how the self, body, mind, and world interrelate. In his major essays on visual art - “Cézanne's Doubt” (1945), “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”(1952), and “Eye and Mind” (1961) - Merleau-Ponty draws on this internal relation between theories of painting and metaphysics to challenge prevailing philosophical and scientific accounts of perception, meaning, imagination, and human subjectivity.

Yet if every theory of painting implies a metaphysical theory, not every metaphysical theory offers a theory of painting. Art plays a central role in Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to elaborate his phenomenology; however, even in the intense, searching reflection of “Cézanne’s Doubt” on the painter’s life and work, it is not clear that from such phenomenological inquiry there emerges a philosophy of art.

In the field of Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is something like the patron saint of the body. Although La Mettrie, Diderot, Nietzsche, and Foucault have also passionately championed the bodily dimension of human life, none can match the bulk of rigorous, systematic, and persistent argument that Merleau-Ponty provides to prove the body's primacy in human experience and meaning. With tireless eloquence that almost seems to conquer by its massive unrelenting flow, he insists that the body is not only the crucial source of all perception and action, but also the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning.

Paradoxically, while celebrating the body's role in expression, Merleau-Ponty typically characterizes it in terms of silence. The body, he writes in Phenomenology of Perception, constitutes “the tacit cogito,”“the silent cogito,” the “unspoken cogito.” As our “primary subjectivity,” it is “the consciousness which conditions language,” but itself remains a “silent consciousness” with an “inarticulate grasp of the world” (PP 461-3/402-4/468-70). Forming “the background of silence” (S 58/46) that is necessary for language to emerge, the body, as gesture, is also already “a tacit language” (S 59/47) and the ground of all expression: “every human use of the body is already primordial expression” (S 84/67).