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).

Horkheimer and Adorno's book Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in the concluding months of the Second World War. It is comparable with contemporaneous works by other exiled German speaking philosophers, notably Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies and Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, in being what Popper himself described as his “contribution to the war effort.” Comparisons are instructive.

Karl Popper was a philosopher of science and a resident of London. The Open Society traces – from the vantage point of western democracy – the way in which a certain kind of intolerant (and hence “unscientific”) thinking reproduces itself in totalitarian political philosophies: Plato is the ancient representative of this tradition, while its modern representatives Hegel and Marx are discerned, despite their superficial political differences, as the authors of twentieth-century dictatorships of all colors. Györky Lukács, by contrast, wrote as a resident of the Soviet Union and as a metaphysician committed to socialism. For him, Marx, and to a substantial extent Hegel as well, were the fountainheads of an enlightened and humane political system. The strength of “scientific socialism” lay precisely in its incorporation of the insights of dialectical philosophy. Dialectic of Enlightenment differs from the other two works in that it reckons up not merely with philosophy under the Nazis, but also with the unashamed free market capitalism of its authors’ temporary home, the United States. The book is a work of conservative cultural criticism, which, on a conceptual level, is by no means incompatible with work the Nazis were happy to tolerate. This is not to say that it is politically tainted. Of the three books mentioned, however, it offers the least clear alternative to the errors it castigates.

Unfinished, still a work-in-progress at the time of his death in 1969, Aesthetic Theory is arguably not only Theodor W. Adorno's masterwork, but perhaps the pivotal document of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. The book was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; and, at one level, the work can be construed as the philosophical articulation of the meaning of artistic modernism, as modernism brought to the level of the concept. Yet even these simple statements cannot be forwarded innocently: that a work of aesthetics stands at or near the center of the thought of Adorno's Marxism has always been cause for consternation and embarrassment; that western Marxism (in the writings of Ernst Bloch, Györky Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse) has been from the outset bound to cultural critique and aesthetic theory can only deepen the puzzle. Some ground-clearing is thus necessary before a real start can be made.

In 1931, three years after the publication of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the obscure masterpiece that he had intended as his habilitation thesis, Walter Benjamin wrote about it to the Swiss editor, Max Rychner:

The location of that connection – whether, indeed, it can be said to exist at all – remains deeply problematic. Nor should this be in the least surprising. What could be further removed from what one would normally understand by “materialism” than Benjamin’s early writings, with their predilection for mystical theories of language and unblushingly antiscientific metaphysics? To put them together with the ideas of Marx and Engels can only, it would seem, undermine the latter: the connection appears at all plausible only if Marxism, its scientific pretensions notwithstanding, rests upon a mystical view of the world.

HABERMAS’S “KANTIAN PRAGMATISM”

Habermas's philosophical career can easily and instructively be read as a succession of attempts to appropriate the achievements of Kant's critical philosophy without being drawn into its commitment to a “philosophy of the subject.” Even Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), whose task is described as the continuation of epistemology by other means (e.g. social theory) and which is perhaps the work most philosophically distant from Kant, opens with an appreciation of Kant's enterprise: “The critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself, that is, a theoretical reason that can dialectically ascertain not only its limits but also its own Idea” (KHI 3). Similarly, Habermas's later conception of philosophy as (in part) a “reconstructive science” that seeks to make explicit the pretheoretical know-how of speaking and acting subjects - expressed most clearly in the project of a formal or universal pragmatics - shares many features with other roughly contemporaneous attempts to deploy transcendental (or “quasitranscendental”) arguments without the trappings of transcendental idealism. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the project of discourse ethics, first outlined in the early 1980s, is explicitly conceived as a defense of a Kantian conception of morality (e.g. categorical imperatives that bind us solely in virtue of our capacity for rational agency) within the context of his theory of communicative action.

It has long been commonplace to point out that the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno has no politics. This is usually meant in three senses. The first is that Critical Theorists of this time explicitly refused to engage in party politics, voice opinions about current events, propose reform agendas, or indeed talk about political institutions in any specific way. The second sense in which early Critical Theory has no politics is that its critique focused more and more on a realm of culture and aesthetics detached from politics. For some this merely led to abstraction, while others thought it led to irrelevance. Finally, and most significantly, early Critical Theory has no politics because its diagnosis of the times is so pessimistic as to make any political action, or indeed any attempt to break out of the logic of instrumental reason, futile. Thus, to the question “What is to be done?” Horkheimer and Adorno appear to answer, “Alas, nothing.”

REVOLUTION IN THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION

In February 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London's Red Republican. This treatise was the one and only celebration of the revolutionary power of the new, bourgeois age. Marx and Engels were expecting from the bourgeoisie and its epoch not only the freeing of all productive forces of humankind, but also the permanent revolution of all relations of production and, what is more, of all social relations:

Critical Theory first develops during a period of extraordinarily complex intellectual activity in Germany. If one were to take the year 1930 as a benchmark - when Max Horkheimer becomes the director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt - and were to look back upon the decade preceding that date, one would encounter in their most vibrant forms many of the most important philosophical movements of the twentieth century: the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger; the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle and the early Wittgenstein; various strands of neo- Kantianism; and the humanistic Marxism of Lukács. In political and social theory, psychology, historiography, and economics the situation is hardly less multifarious. Each of these views or schools, sometimes in combination with elements of others, vies for predominance in the Weimar period. Moreover, each of the contenders takes care to incorporate within it involved criticisms of the others.

The members of the Institute for Social Research were the first group of philosophers and social theorists to take psychoanalysis seriously - indeed, to grant Freud the stature that is generally reserved for the giants of the philosophical tradition. In addition to Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Freud became one of the foundation stones on which their interdisciplinary program for a critical theory of society was constructed. It has often been observed that the Critical Theorists turned to psychoanalysis to make up for a deficiency in Marxian theory, namely, its reduction of the psychological realm to socioeconomic factors. This explanation, however, does not go far enough. With a few notable exceptions, the Left was not particularly interested in the modernist cultural movements of the past century - or, worse yet, denounced them for their bourgeois decadence. Though it may have proved to be an impossible project, the Frankfurt School - largely under Adorno's influence - sought to integrate cultural modernism with left-wing politics. And this is one of the places where psychoanalysis came to play an important role. For, despite Freud's own stolid lifestyle and aesthetic conservatism, his creation, psychoanalysis, made an incontrovertible contribution to the radical avant-garde that was transforming almost every realm of European culture. The Interpretation of Dreams and Ulysses are cut from the same cloth.

With the turn of the new century, Critical Theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact. This superficial dividing point alone seems to increase the intellectual gap separating us from the theoretical beginnings of the Frankfurt School. Just as the names of authors who were for its founders vividly present suddenly sound from afar, so too the theoretical challenges from which the members of the school had won their insights threaten to fall into oblivion. Today a younger generation carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of western Marxism. Indeed, already over thirty years have passed since the writings of Marcuse and Horkheimer were last read as contemporary works. There is an atmosphere of the outdated and antiquated, of the irretrievably lost, that surrounds the grand historical-philosophical ideas of Critical Theory, ideas for which there no longer seems to be any kind of resonance within the experience of the accelerating present. The deep chasm that separates us from our predecessors must be comparable to that which separated the first generation of the telephone and movie theatre from the last representatives of German idealism. The same vexed astonishment with which a Benjamin or a Kracauer may have observed a photo of the late Schelling must today come over a young student who, on her computer, stumbles across a photo of the young Horkheimer posing in a bourgeois Wilhelmian interior.