research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 35–53 Research

in
Phenomenology

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“Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs”:

On Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès

Stephen Watson
University of Notre Dame
swatson@nd.edu

Abstract

In a letter written at the end of July 1930, Jean Cavaillès singled out two of his success-
ful students (agrégatifs) at the Ecole Normale, Merleau-Ponty and Lautman, “full of
interest in the philosophy of mathematics”. While both would play an important role
in French philosophy in the coming decades, one almost never thinks of their names
together. Indeed, only rarely do we think of Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès together. This
paper will argue against this rarity. Cavaillès would write a treatise on logic that in ret-
rospect is often viewed to advance French philosophy—but precisely at the expense
phenomenology. I will argue that this evaluation is overblown. Merleau-Ponty’s philos-
ophy, on the other hand, is often viewed in opposition to this as defending a Husserlian
account of perception, a view equally too narrow. Between them, instead, I argue, we
can see both transforming the Husserlian account of a transcendental logic and a tran-
scendental aesthetic. Both provide resources for understanding phenomenology as a
dialectical and historically emergent theory. Notwithstanding Cavaillès initial charac-
terization of Husserl’s “exhorbitant use of the Cogito”, or his “aggressive” description of
acts, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, the result, in both cases, focuses on phenomenology
as an emergent experience of philosophy as an “architecture” of signs.

Keywords

Merleau-Ponty – Cavaillès – Husserl – transcendental logic – transcendental aesthetics –

language – philosophy of consciousness

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341327

36 Watson

What does describing signify for an intelligible system?

CAVAILLÈS (LTS:381)

…
(For Husserl) the only role of signs is to transmit a signification of which
they are not a part (this is contrary to the definition of poetry (my idea of
presence or of figured world = there of that world only a poetic knowl-
edge). For Husserl, in perception, hyletic elements are not signifiers
(I reverse: the very signifiers of language function as perceptual hylé).
MERLEAU-PONTY (GN:182)

⸪
The standard view of French phenomenology’s fate became canonical in
Foucault’s 1978 preface to the English translation of Canguilhem’s On the
Normal and the Pathological.1 Foucault claimed that Husserl’s phenomenology
was received in France in two different hermeneutic strains. One was com-
prised by those who stressed a philosophy of experience, of sense, and of sub-
ject, particularly Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: the other, by those who stressed
the philosophy of knowledge, rationality and of concept, namely Bachelard,
Cavaillès and Canguilhem. Foucault’s protocols found historical precedent
in Canguilhem’s 1976 paper inaugurating the Sorbonne’s amphitheater Jean
Cavaillès. There, emphasizing his Spinozist commitments over against French
philosophy’s Cartesian tradition, Canguilhem claimed that Cavaillès had antic-
ipated by twenty years the task of contemporary philosophy: “substituting the
primacy of the concept, of system and structure for the primacy of conscious-
ness or reflection.”2 I will argue instead that phenomenology itself is a concept
that is (to use, still, Canguilhem’s terms) “theoretically polyvalent,” and that
so are the terms of Foucault’s divisions, whose ‘fluidity’ belies the fixed char-
acter of his distinction.3 The result impacts not only a question of ­historical

1  Michel Foucault, Introduction to Canguilhem, in The Normal and the Pathological, trans.
Carolyn R. Fawcett, Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 8–9.
2  Georges Canguilhem, “Inauguration de l’ amphitheatre Jean Cavaillès,” in Jean Cavaillès,
Oeuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 673–4.
3  Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 37

Verstehen with respect to these figures, but the theoretical implications of phe-
nomenology itself.
As is well known, unlike the other figures in the tradition of epistemol-
ogy of the history of science, Cavaillès carried out considerable research into
Husserl’s thought and this recurred throughout the last decade and a half of his
tragically shortened career. He had heard Husserl’s Paris lectures and had occa-
sion to meet Husserl following his attendance at the famous Davos debates
between Cassirer and Heidegger. Nonetheless, while interested in Husserl’s
thought from the beginning, he remained critical, indeed disappointed.
Writing of his ongoing research into Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental
Logic, in a letter from July, 1931, Cavaillès stated, “His general philosophical
method is of some use but the system he derives from it is so far removed from
all Brunschvicg and co. have taught me that I rather fear (short of some sort
of conversion) that I shall have to regard it as alien” (CL 71). He may well have
agreed, in accord with Husserl’s transcendental reduction, that mathematics
was a pure and not an empirical domain whose products must be correlated
with the activity from which it emerges. He diverged from Husserl on the
status of the resulting derivations. What, among other things, Brunschvicg
had ‘taught’ Cavaillès was that mathematics required less a formalist than a
historical approach. Still, as another early letter detailed, while Brunschvicg
may be “perhaps closest to the truth,” Cavaillès also claims that he “indulges
by sleight of hand” (CL 41). Brunschvicg’s account still linked mathematics to
intuition, while Cavaillès insisted on its inferential purity. The role of intuition,
in effect, would be retained only by linking the mathematician’s activity to a
prior historical achievement, one in which the account evidences perhaps an
initial proximity to Bachelard: science is not about memory and reiteration of
origins, but extension and overcoming obstacles. Rather than retaining a link
to originating intuition, the experience of mathematics, in short, involved a
transformation of signs.4 Husserl’s account lacks the dialectic of the concept
by which science becomes emancipated from origins.5
Still, Brunschvicg’s influence remains effective. In Cavaillès’ letter to him
from 1941, when Brunschvicg was then a war refugee at Aix-en-Provence,

4  For further details of this transformation see the analysis of Cavaillès’ account in Pierre
Cassou-Noguès, De l’expérience mathématique: essai sur philosophie des sciences de Jean
Cavaillès (Paris: Vrin: 2001), especially chapters iv–v. Notably, Cassou–Noguès similarly
stresses the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès, but stresses the problematic of
expression in his analysis.
5  See the analysis of David Webb, “Cavaillès, Hussserl and the Historicity of Science, Angelaki
8, no. 3 (2003): 59–72.

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38 Watson

Cavaillès describes the Ecole Normale as a “little ‘symposium’ ” in which

Brunschvicq’s Etages, L’Expérience humaine and Le Progrès de la Conscience
came to dominate our views” (CL 148). References to these works abound in
Merleau-Ponty’s writings from the early forties. In this same letter Cavaillès
states that “Thao has written an excellent dissertation on Husserl a bit influ-
enced by Hegel or even Fink” (CL 148). While all three of these thinkers wrote
during a renaissance of French interest in Hegel’s philosophy, it was about this
time that they were gaining access to Husserl’s (and Fink’s) unpublished manu-
scripts.6 Cavaillès letter specifically notes the 15,000 pages of Husserl’s writings
available to Thao then. Yet all three would eventually be critical of Husserl’s
idealism; all three would be influenced by both Hegel and Fink in attempt-
ing to overcome what Merleau-Ponty, for example, criticized as Husserl’s own
lingering neo-Kantianism, especially evident for him during the Ideen period
(PhP 243n, 274n).
While Merleau-Ponty would remain closest to Husserl and would con-
tinuously mine these later manuscripts, it was by no means at Brunschvicg’s
expense.7 One might, for example, consider his discussion of geometrical proof
in the Phenomenology and its rejection of formalism. Merleau-Ponty rejects
any idea of a timeless, formal essence of a triangle (PhP 385): “There would be
neither thought nor truth but for an act whereby I prevail over the dispersion
of the phases of thought.” The necessity of proof is not an analytic necessity.
The construction that enables the conclusion is not contained in the essence
of the triangle but is “merely possible when the essence serves as the starting
point” (PhP 385). Formalization is always “retrospective,” never otherwise than
apparently complete; the ‘essence’ it articulates involves the “presumption of a
completed synthesis.” This proves, he claims, that “formal thought always feeds
on intuitive thought” (PhP 385). But this by no means led him (as it would
Cavaillès) to claim that mathematics remains an internally dialectic process
or even that “geometrical thinking transcends perceptual consciousness”
(PhP 388). Rather it is to be understood, like all truths, precisely as a dialectic
of perception (PhP 395).

6  See H.L. Van Breda, “Merleau-Ponty and the Husserl Archives at Louvain,” trans. Stephen
Michelman in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James
Barry, Jr. (Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), Appendix 2.
7  See Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 reappraisal of the significance of Brunschvicg’s influence (some-
what surprisingly, in contrast with Bergson) in “the French philosophical landscape” in the
1930’s in “The Philosophy of Existence,” trans. Allen S. Weiss, in Texts and Dialogues (Albany:
Prometheus Books, 1996), chapter 14.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 39

The Phenomenology’s claim was not only that mathematics could not be
grasped as a timeless act, that its objectivity required the articulation of an his-
torical emergence, but that here, too, perception is a “special case” (PhP 377).
Perception founds the rational, that is, the rational never stops being what it
is in perception: “all consciousness is, in some measure, perceptual conscious-
ness” (PhP 395). This led Merleau-Ponty to believe that Wertheimer’s Gestalt
psychology, which he cites in his analysis of geometrical proof (PhP 384), might
furnish the key even for mathematics. While the Phenomenology sought (like
Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, which it also cites) to understand geometry as a
cultural phenomenology, it articulated its historical continuity, less as Husserl
had done by ultimately turning to reflective constitution, than by further artic-
ulating the bond of the perceptual world, “the pre-personal” and “unforget-
table tradition” it continuously presupposed (PhP 251, 407).
The same had been said of language. As multifarious as he already knew
cultural expression to be (scientific, mathematical, artistic, linguistic, etc.),
when the Cogito chapter, having linked geometry to both history and contin-
gency, finally confronted the issue of language, it became resolved again by
articulating the pre-linguistic silent perceptual foundation—and, famously, the
experience of the “silent cogito” it always presupposes. The latter would furnish
the “original text” that all knowledge was trying to translate (PhP 337,402).
And the claim in the end was, somewhat fantastically, that perception was
“amenable” to both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry (PhP 391).8
As straightforward as the view might be it is surely not, to use Bachelard’s
term, without complication. As the preface to Sense and Non-Sense, noted
in proclaiming that we must form a new idea of reason, it may not be some
simple, or in any case so continuous—perhaps not even for the rationality of
perception itself. This belongs to a time when Merleau-Ponty was beginning
to concern himself further not simply with our pre-predicative perceptual ori-
gins, but with the expressive status of the cultural objects that not only emerge
from, but also exhibit them: in particular, the role of language. But he noted
as well the status of mathematics in this revision of the rational: “Expression
is like a step in the fog—no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead. Even
our mathematics no longer resembles a long chain of reasoning . . . Instead of
an intelligible world there are nebulae separated by expanses of darkness. The

8  Merleau-Ponty’s previous book had already claimed that “perceptual space is not a Euclidean
space, that perceived objects change properties when they change place” (SB 144). While
later Merleau-Ponty acknowledges “Euclidean space as the model for perspectival being,” in
its autonomy it “realizes of itself a repression of transcendence” (VI 211; 213).

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40 Watson

world of culture is as discontinuous as the other world, and it too has its secret
mutations” (SNS 4).
Later, Merleau-Ponty famously challenged his account of the distinction
between Descartes’ cogito as a cultural phenomenon and the silent cogito it phe-
nomenologically presupposed (VI 175ff). The argument of the Phenomenology
was that “before any word is uttered” there was meaning and cognitive con-
tent that was pre-reflective and pre-predicative, namely in our bodily being
in the world, an operative intentionality initially revealed and founded in
perception; moreover the latter both founds and is never fully superseded by
reflective acts (PhP 38). Here he appealed to what he calls Husserl’s “favor-
ite word,” Stiftung, translating it as “fondement” to account for the relation
(PhP 127n). Again, the later Merleau-Ponty would not contradict this account,
but he would transform it (and his foundationalist rather than more dialec-
tical reading of Stiftung). While this transformation has broad impact on his
philosophy it impacts his understanding of linguistic and cultural expression
on two counts. First, he would disconnect conceptual content from individual
consciousness or a subjective idiolect in further stressing the institutional his-
tory out of which expression emerges. Second, he would articulate mute expe-
rience on the basis of an expression not simply pre-predicatively derived but
articulated instead at the limits of language itself, a depiction at best captured
indirectly, laterally and by divergence (écart). Hence, as is often recognized,
the importance of Saussure, on whom Merleau-Ponty had lectured as early as
1947: the institution of language is historical and parole does not found it from
a “silent cogito” but rather it is achieved by the transformation or “coherent
deformation” of language (S:91). Both Merleau-Ponty and Saussure singled out
analogical transformation and, by implication, the question of analogia entis
for its articulation. What this entailed was complicated in effect and we will
need to spend some time unpacking it—and distancing it ultimately from its
standard interpretation, often guided by the alternative of Cavaillès’ alleged
Spinozist protocols. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on expression and Cavaillès’ on
inference would seemingly be at odds, but it becomes apparent that this char-
acterization is perhaps only apparent.
Jean-Toussaint Desanti related a conversation in which Merleau-Ponty
stated, à propos Hegel’s Science of Logic, “I do not believe a philosophy of the
concept is possible, but only a philosophy of the access to a concept.”9 In a
footnote to his 1952 Logic and Existence, Jean Hyppolite wondered about a
rapprochement between Hegel and Spinoza in Cavaillès, noting that for Hegel

9  Jean-Toussaint Desanti, “Spinoza et La Phénoménologie,” Spinoza au XXe siècle, ed. Olivier

Bloch (Paris: PUF, 1992), 114–5.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 41

the self is more immanent to the content.10 Merleau-Ponty’s gloss on senso-

riality had perhaps indicated as much in attempting to understand how the
subject is time itself: “how we can say with Hegel that time is the existence of
mind, or refer with Husserl to a self-constitution of time” (PhP 241). Fink’s Sixth
Cartesian Meditation had openly suggested that the articulemes of Husserl’s
exhibition of experience would need to be understood in terms of the “fluid-
ity” of Hegel’s speculative proposition.11 And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out,
Husserl himself invoked the term to distinguish relative forms of ideality in
Experience and Judgement; in so doing, he stated, beyond his earlier logicism,
Husserl “makes rationality a problem” (PhP 365n).12
It was not Hegel but Spinoza that was at stake for Desanti. And for Desanti
(and others who invoked Spinoza in this regard), phenomenology and
Spinozism were antithetical: the zero point of phenomenological reduction
dissolves the habemus enim ideam veram into passive synthesis and the tran-
scendent richness of sense experience; hence “Exit Spinoza,” Desanti declared.13
But, here too, we should be careful about this alleged opposition.
To begin, we can cite Desanti himself to remind us that Merleau-Ponty’s
alleged statement denying the coherence of the philosophy of the concept
was made with reference to Hegel. Moreover, as Desanti himself declared
elsewhere, what Cavaillès himself meant by the concept ultimately remained

10  Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1997), 52–3n
11  Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of A Transcendental Theory of Method,
trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 77. Fink would
return to this issue in his influential “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology”,
trans William McKenna in A Priori and World ed. W. Mckenna, R. Harlan and E. Winters
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), 61.
12  Such “fluidity” is echoed in Cavaillès’ claim that “the term ‘consciousness’ does not admit
of univocity of application,” that instead each is bound and surpassed to other moments
of consciousness corresponding or correlated to dialectical moments (LTS: 409). The echo
here is surely Hegelian: “Thoughts become fluid ( flüssig) when, pure thinking, this inner
immediacy, recognizes itself as moment.” See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 20). For further discussion of this issue
see my “Cancellations: Hegel, Husserl and the Remains of the Dialectic”, In the Shadow of
Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I (London: Continuum, 2009), chapter 4.
13  Desanti. Spinoza et La Phénoménologie, 121. This interpretation is somewhat foreshad-
owed in Thao’s claim that “The total justification of the phenomenological undertaking,
which would finally place philosophy ‘on the sure road to science’, ends, paradoxically in
a sensualistic relativism.” See Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism,
trans. Daniel Herman and Donald V. Morano (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 130.

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42 Watson

unclear and the link to Hegel in this regard not without risk.14 For Desanti,
nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty’s own account of language would simply dis-
solve its syntactic or inferential connection, its rational history, to explore
the “mute meaning.”15 Claude Imberte similarly contrasted Cavaillès here:
Merleau-Ponty’s “linguistic turn” would make philosophy inseparable from
language, exploring its expressive capacities somewhat along similar lines as
the later Wittgenstein.16 But we should wonder about this opposition between
what Cavaillès called “syntactic imagination” and semantic imagination—
or what Foucault called the “murmur” of the word. Wittgenstein’s stress
on ordinary language, “leaving everything as it is,” is precisely foreign to the
coherent deformation at stake in the dialectic both Cavaillès and Merleau-
Ponty emphasized.17 Much attention has been given to the account of silent
or mute experience in the later Merleau-Ponty, one, following Husserl, that
he articulated in terms of a Selbstvergessenheit at work in the reflective analy-
sis that presupposed it (S 173). But reciprocally, much forgetfulness has been
at work regarding this account’s relation to Merleau-Ponty’s own reading of
Hegel, dialectic and the emerging interpretation (and reinterpretation) of
institution (Stiftung) in the later work, one that again ‘shadows’ (the term is
Fink’s) and co-determines the account of experience.18
Let us begin with Husserl’s Krisis account; it is this book that preoccupied
Thao, Cavaillès and Merleau-Ponty. Consistent with what Merleau-Ponty crit-
icized later about the Phenomenology ‘s emphasis on “the alleged silence of
psychological coincidence,” this book initially stressed what he termed the
Krisis’ “existentialism” (VI 179; PhP 174n). But let’s recall that in the first place
the Krisis emerges precisely because Husserl acknowledged that the reduction
seemed “devoid of content (Inhaltsleer)” (K 155). As I have argued elsewhere,
the Krisis’ historical turn occurred precisely to provide not only the histori-
cal context, but the conceptual content that would overcome this lack, one
that even the analysis of the lifeworld itself could not supplant.19 While the

14  Jean-Toussaint Desanti, La philosophie silencieuse ou critique des philosophies de la science

(Paris: Seuil, 1975), 62–3.
15  Ibid., 74
16  Claude Imberte, “For a History of Logic,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in French Philosophy
Since 1945, ed. E, Balibar, J. Rajchman, and A. Boyman (New York: New Press, 2011), 53.
17  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, §124 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1958), 49e.
18  See Eugen Fink, “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” 131ff.
19  For further discussion of this issue see my “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Itinerary
From Body Schema to Situated Knowledge: On How We Are and How We Are Not to
‘Sing the World,’ ” Janus Head 9 no.2 (2007): 525–550, and “Beyond the Speaking of things:

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 43

­ istory it entailed was perhaps more a matter of Dichtung and not proof in
h
the mathematical sense, its transcendental necessities were purportedly clear
(K 394). Equally clear, however, was that Husserl traced a history that escaped
present conscious reflections, if not the operative intentions of its theoreti-
cians. Husserl could claim (classically) that we are enabled “to understand
past thinkers in a way that they never have understood themselves” (K 73).
Moreover blinded by naturalism the true meaning of their theories “remained
and had to remain hidden (verborgen) from the physicists, including the great
and the greatest” (K 53). If science were always a return to origins here too,
even Husserl implicitly admitted, its truth was not simply a return or a reitera-
tion but an extension and an overcoming of obstacles. This historical account
of the intentional development of the rational should have piqued Cavaillès’
interest for an account of Wissenschaftslehre (and it did). Husserl’s ultimate
return to Cartesian reflection for its source, however, could only disappoint
him—as it did Merleau-Ponty, as has become evident. What Cavaillès clearly
denied was that the transcendental history Husserl had stumbled upon could
be understood simply as a return to origins, or at least the myth of a return to
the past (LTS 408). Here his criticisms were again similar to Bachelard’s. To
cite Bachelard’s terms, “the decisive action of reason is almost always confused
with monotonous recourse to the certitudes of memory.”20
Clearly, this is not to say that Merleau and Cavaillès’ views were the same
nor even in all respects compatible. Still, in the unpublished sections of
The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty perhaps realizes the limitations of the
Phenomenology view: “we are not reducing mathematical evidence to percep-
tual evidence ” (PW 123). Moreover, he does not deny “the originality of the
order of knowledge vis à vis the perceptual order.” Mathematics, that is, has its
own history yet without, as he puts it, ever attaining the “the solidity of natu-
ral objects.” That is, like other cultural objects, it again has a history, albeit a
nonfactual history, he insisted as much as Cavaillès. Still echoing Brunschvicg,
Merleau-Ponty claimed: “We are trying to show not that mathematical thought
rests upon the sensible but that it is creative” (PW 126). Again, whatever
remains of essence here is not given in advance but on the horizon. Instead:
“we are dealing with a veritable development of meaning” (PW 127). But in this

Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of Kant’s Third

Critique,” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement (2008): 124–134.
20  Bachelard, “Surrationalism”, trans. Julien Levy, Arsenal 4 (1989): 112. He adds, almost with
Husserl’s account of rational meaning as determinate repeatable in mind: “That which is
well known, which has often been experienced, that which one faithfully repeats, easily,
vehemently, gives the impression of rational and objective coherence.”

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44 Watson

development, he held, mathematical thought is not the contradictory of the

sensible but “benefits from the carnal ties that unite both” (PW 123–4). It did
so precisely as exploration and re-conquest of the world and the “world thesis”
(PW 124).
Here we seem to come to a divide among the Ecole Normale interpreters.
Husserl’s ‘world thesis’ had been criticized by Thao for being insufficiently
realist.21 But Cavaillès saw in it the return of the sort of “violent truncation
(coup de force)” he first attributed to logical empiricism; while the correlations
revealed by the epochē removes the naïveté of the latter, this violence returns
in its restrictions on formal ontology (LTS 400). Ultimately, citing Husserl,
Cavaillès charged that we are again dogmatically returned to “the carnal body
of things” where the forms of the logical scaffolding remain truly mute; that is,
as he now cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it “says nothing” (LTS 403). Merleau-
Ponty, too, had railed against the Vienna school’s attempts to construct a world
“more real than consciousness” (PhP 23); like Cavaillès, then, he could equally
claim that Carnap was an “old enemy” (CL 154). But his emphasis on the “unfor-
gettable tradition” of perception seemed precisely to have missed the lesson of
Husserl’s failure regarding the articulative inventions of syntactic imagination,
one affecting not only transcendental logic but transcendental aesthetics.
One might think that these two thinkers just went separate ways in the
ruins of the Krisis project, one to explore intentional correlation by follow-
ing the internal dialectic of conceptual and inferential necessity, the other to
further mine the remains of the lifeworld that Husserl claimed accompanied
it. Something of this, after all, is true. But the simple disjunct it presupposes
would be equally mistaken. As Gurwitsch once pointed out, even “the concept
‘life-world,’ world of daily existence, etc., is after all a polemical concept . . . If
we didn’t have science we wouldn’t need this concept.”22 Even the explorations
of the lifeworld itself unfold by means of historical and conceptual necessity.
And Merleau-Ponty steadily came to a similar insight. Cavaillès articulated a
genetic “combinatory space” in claiming that it is the theory of signs that justi-
fies the objectivity of the systems (OC 601). But Merleau-Ponty had not simply
missed the point: “Each philosophy is also an architecture of signs” (IPP 57).
Even a philosophy whose historical motivation led it to stress the exploration
of the sensible would ultimately acknowledge that it did so only h ­ istorically.

21  See Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, 129. Famously, Thao
claimed, “we end with dialectical materialism as the truth of transcendental idealism.”
22  Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schütz, Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred
Schütz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939–1959 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 233.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 45

In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty could indeed still speak of our access
to the sensible in terms of the mute or operative language of perception
(PW 124). But it led to readings of the sensible in terms that were not contradic-
tory but still altered from his original position concerning the fundamental.
He also knew, in claiming that philosophy is an architecture of signs, that the
signs of philosophy are not simply generated out of the “mute” language of
perception: “Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical
discourse” (IPP 57). Indeed the sensible as such is indiscoverable (introuvable).
Sense data are historical and “vary through the centuries” (S 48). As he would
later acknowledge: one cannot “reduce history to the visible” (VI 266). Instead
the visible is always the visible of some invisible, some culture, some history
(VI 229).
One might think that grasping this mutual articulation of history is what is
crucial to grasping the écart between Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès. And as has
been seen, some have claimed this écart is actually a lingering écart between
Spinoza and Descartes, where the former claimed that mathematics depends
upon the eternity of an idea (habemus ideam verum) and not the evidence of
a cogito. Or, it is Spinoza versus Husserl, as Desanti charged. But there is little
reason to think that Cavaillès had simply denied Husserl’s account of correla-
tion. As has been seen, he endorsed Husserl’s method at this point, distinguish-
ing the empirical and the ‘transcendental’ in his work in the early 1930’s; but
he also invoked Husserl in correcting Carnap in his final manuscript. Still, it
remained the case: Cartesian reductionism could not account for inferential
genesis where, rather than a return to origins, before and after are intrinsic to
mathematical development. In this regard, at stake is the question of grasping
what kind of temporality is at work in this development itself.
Early on in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty confronted current neo-
Kantian readings of Spinoza, denying that the cogito “reveals to me a new
mode of existence owing nothing to time” (PhP 372). Quoting Lachièze-Rey,
he states: “It is not enough to say that my mind, ‘when it is a question of the
form of all of the objects of sense . . . is the God of Spinoza’ ” (PhP 372). It cannot
be case that each time we pronounce an idea true we ascend to “the absolute
because that is what he eternally is” (PhP 373):

Habemus ideam veram, we possess a truth, but this experience of truth

would be absolute knowledge only if we could thematize every motive,
that is, we ceased to be in a situation. The actual possession of the true
idea does not, therefore, entitle us to predicate an intelligible abode
of adequate thought and absolute productivity, it establishes merely a

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46 Watson

‘­teleology’ of consciousness which, from this first instrument, will forge

more perfect ones, and these in turn more perfect ones still. and so on
endlessly. (PhP 395)

This is to be contrasted with Spinoza’s idea of eternity:

What is this eternally true that no one possesses? . . . We experience, not

a genuine eternity and participation in the one, but concrete acts of tak-
ing up and carrying forward by which, through time’s accidents, we are
linked in relationships with ourselves and others. (PhP 394–5)

Now it is this temporal experience (the question of access to the concept)

that Desanti (presumably following Cavaillès) denied in contrasting the mute
exploration of the sensible with the eternity of the adequate idea—and he
claimed that even Husserl’s transcendental reduction presumed such an idea
in articulating the immanent structures of the Cogito.23 But again this should
give us pause. Desanti’s contrast seems to be restricted to the Phenomenology’s
own ‘truncated,’ reductivist, that is, perceptual account of mathematics and
not the later account. Moreover, it leaves open the question of how time might
be tied to eternity. Has Merleau-Ponty simply excluded the experience of tran-
scendence or eternity by claiming we have no actual experience of eternity?
Moreover if we do not attain an actual experience of eternity, does this pre-
clude a presumptive one and need this preclude all claims to adequacy? Was
this not precisely the Husserlian idea from which Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès
exploration began? Moreover, continually linked to the Husserlian account of
correlation, was it not precisely this that brought the question of the invoca-
tion of Spinoza possible in affirming the purity of mathematics?
It is crucial in this regard to note that Cavaillès’s only invocation of Spinoza’s
idea in “Logic and the Theory of Science” occurs precisely in parsing the antin-
omy Brunschwicq had bequeathed: logical ideality must presuppose either the
fiat of a generative consciousness’ creative act or the “absolute intelligibility
which legitimates the Spinozist idea” (LTS 369). But the rational development
Cavaillès articulated overcame both, by drawing closer to the later Husserl’s his-
torical turn all the while surpassing its mythic return to static origins. Husserl
himself, after all, distinguished between the temporality of consciousness and
the non-temporal character of mathematical propositions spontaneously gen-
erated therein (cf. ITC 124). It is only one step further (and another of Cavaillès’
students, Albert Lautman will make it, but by appealing to Heidegger) to claim

23  Desanti, Spinoza et La Phénoménologie, 124–5.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 47

that “[o]ne thus introduces an ordering of before and after at the level of
Ideas that is not a temporal ordering but rather an eternal model of time,
the pattern of a continuous, ongoing genesis, a necessary order of creation.”24
What Cavaillès adds is that progress occurs not by a simply return or a reitera-
tion: “what comes after is more than what existed before, not because it pro-
longs it but because it departs from it and carries in its content the mark of its
superiority, unique every time, with more consciousness—and not the same
consciousness” (LTS 409).
Equally notable is that we will almost find Desanti’s claim about Husserl’s
presupposed Spinozism in the Phenomenology of Perception. Indeed the Phe­
nomenology itself pairs Lachièze-Rey with Husserl’s Ideen period (PhP 243n).
But the first time Merleau-Ponty confronts the Spinozist habemus ideam veram
and acknowledges its neo-Kantian analyses to be based in “the test of mathe-
matical truth,” he does not simply deny the claim. Nor does he “blame” what he
calls their intellectualist predilection (now including Husserl’s ‘original doxa’)
for invoking the realm of Spinozist eternity. Instead “what we do complain of,
is that it is used tacitly” without acknowledging “the thickness of duration”
from which it emerges (PhP 39–40). What he claimed instead was that “the
idea of self evident truth, which, by invoking an absolute truth, brings together
the separate phenomena of my present and my past, of my duration and that
others . . . must not be severed from its perceptual origins and detached from
its ‘facticity’ ” (PhP 40). Of course, The Visible and the Invisible will still invoke
such facticity as being at stake in what it terms the “ultimate notion” of the

24  Jean Cavaillès and Albert Lautman, “Mathematical Thought,” Excerpts from the Remarks
of Jean Cavaillès, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in French Philosophy Since 1945 (New York:
New Press, 2011), 65. I note that a letter written at the end of July, 1930 by Cavaillès already
singled out two of his successful students (“agrégatifs”) at the Ecole Normale, Merleau-
Ponty and Lautman, “full of interest in the philosophy of mathematics” (CL 44, translation
altered). Still, as is often pointed out Cavaillès was opposed to Lautman here under the
assumption that such a Heideggerean account would subject mathematical necessity to
existence (versus essence) and to what is outside or “beneath” it, though he admitted the
possibility that they might ultimately agree. In any case I have denied this classical (and
still static) account, though neither Lautman nor Merleau-Ponty, as will become evident,
would ultimately endorse Heidegger, save perhaps on this interpretation of time. The
‘beneath’, too, is subject to the requisites of articulation and historical development. We
would need both, truth and time, for a necessary and sufficient account, a syntactic and
semantic account of the rational. What then of Cavaillès’ famous claim that the term con-
sciousness is multiple, not univocal, its plasticity indefinite (LTS 409)? We might recall
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the dialectic as containing multiple points of entry (AD 204),
one that maintains the positions and contours of the multiple (T 57).

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48 Watson

flesh, delineating the historicity and ‘reversibility’ in our sensible generality

(VI 140).
Still, Merleau-Ponty’s gloss on facticity in terms of perception finds further
refinement in later works, acquiring further conceptual and developmental
and institutional necessity. It will give rise to the recognition that a philosophy
of perception too is an architecture of signs, that even the histoire sauvage that
it ultimately revealed emerged, as is evident here, not by the return to a mythic
“golden age” where “everything that now exists or will exists prepares itself for
being put into words” (PW 6). Instead it emerges by coherent deformation, that
is, by the dialectical transformation of its own (empiricist and intellectualist)
conceptual past. If this new history was not based in mathematical thinking,
it did not simply substitute the vision of a mute experience for the former, but
continually explored the thickness, the duration and ultimately the history that
necessarily shadowed it: “sensible being is not only things also everything out-
lined there, even virtually, everything which leaves it trace there, which figures
there, even as divergence (écart) and certain absence” (S 172). Merleau-Ponty’s
overall position claims that one never fully departs from the factical, that in
this respect one never fully escapes the sensible, but what he also came to
understand was that one neither simply remains nor even arrives there except
through an articulative history. “Description is not a return to the immediate”
(PP 30). “There is no vision without the screen” (VI 150). The appearance of the
sensible always contains the institution and means whereby it is sketched out
or rendered visible (S 172). Nature is inevitable figured. And yet it is not simply
reducible to a construct—and that seemed to be precisely the claim for the
radical transformation of modern science. As Koyré put it, “Experience in
the sense of raw sensation . . . did not play any role except that of obstacle in the
birth of classical science.”25 The position, as Lyotard noted, reflects Bachelard’s
epistemology but remains coherent with Husserl’s claims about modern
science—and, on Cavaillès’ reading, with Husserl’s own reductivist inversion of
it.26 Although Merleau-Ponty would not rejoin Husserl in the latter, he would
not simply assume the Bachelardian position as its alternative. As he put it vis
à vis Bachelard in his Nature lectures:

25  Alexandre Koyré, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon Etudes galiléenes (Paris: Hermann,
1966), 13.
26  See Jean-François Lyotard, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Discourse, Figure
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 433n.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 49

Certainly the position of the philosopher is not without risk. As Bachelard

says, what we call ‘natural’ is often only bad theory. But if we are aware
of the artificiality of thinking, as Bachelard is, do we need to find a dia-
lectical contrary for it, this opposing entity—if not Nature, at least the
perceived? (N 95)

Still, in the end, perhaps neither would ultimately suffice. From the begin-
ning perception itself was figured: perception was understood “in the wide
sense of knowledge of existence” (au sens large de connaissance des existences)
(PhP 40). Ultimately, however, he claimed of this resistance that traditional
names for it all are lacking: “There are no names in traditional philosophy
to designate it” (VI 139). It requires instead its own écart, or figural or poetic
“deformation,” one articulated as a dialectical extension of the history and
the conceptual past from which it emerges (VI 139). His notion of the flesh
emerges out of what he termed elsewhere, the “adventure of constitutive anal-
ysis” (S 177). Doubtless these terms allude to his 1955 work, The Adventures of
the Dialectic. And, as the notion of the flesh itself instantiates, it both emerges
from and presupposes such a dialectic, the very constitutive and argumenta-
tive sequence The Visible and the Invisible articulates. But as much as he refers
to Bachelard’s account of poetic element to articulate the flesh, Merleau-Ponty
was still not far from his account of rationality as a dialectical development
that overcomes theoretical and historical obstacles (to wit: the limitations of
Husserl’s Cartesian account).27 As Merleau-Ponty also knew, this new notion
“flesh”, certainly not absent from Husserl’s Ideen II, distinguished his account
from the naive descriptions of static phenomenology and the theory of analytic
reflection. Indeed in a curious nod, perhaps, to the Vienna Circle, at one point
the Phenomenology declared that “until phenomenology becomes genetic phe-
nomenology, unhelpful revisions to causal thought and naturalism will remain
justified” (PhP 126). As has become evident this genesis was both sensible and
historical. Moreover, while paired with ‘facticity (or ‘sensible generality’) this
is also what ultimately distinguishes the poetics of the account in The Visible
and the Invisible from the mystical and probably mythic Sagen and Namen
of Heideggerian poetic projection. The latter’s failure, for M ­ erleau-Ponty

27  For further discussion of this issue see my “Notes on Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty:
Between Phenomenology and Poetics,” in Phenomenology, Institution and History:
Writings After Merleau-Ponty II (London: Continuum, 2009), chapter 4. On the issue of
the insufficiency of Husserl’s reduction, see for example VI 172.

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50 Watson

was internal: Heidegger sought for a “direct expression of being all the while
proving that being was not susceptible to direct expression” (NC 148).
Merleau-Ponty had learned the lesson. The flesh, after all, doesn’t refer
except indirectly and by means of a certain sense-history. He once described
the immanence of the world as the phenomenological “omnitudo realitas”
(PhP 398n). All that remains here now is the transcendence articulated in
what Fink had already called its “operative concepts;” for example, the tran-
scendence articulated in the history and experience that are schematized, not
as presence, possession or coincidence but as divergence and transcendence
within the horizons of history itself. Here, to use Kant’s metaphor, our con-
cepts truly inform our horizons and are our points of view. As Merleau-Ponty
put it, philosophy constitutes itself through such operative concepts: “philoso-
phy is an operative language” (VI 126). Of course “this does not disqualify it
from speaking of language, nor from speaking of the pre-language, and of the
mute world which doubles them . . .” (VI 126–7). But the point is that all of these
are inextricably indirect: moves articulated through linguistic figures and lin-
guistic derivations. In this way the “iteration of the Lebenswelt” involves a
“construction (in the mode of ‘logic’) that facilitates the discovery of the world
of silence (VI 170).28
Let us sum up. Cavaillès denied the possibility that consciousness could
‘dominate theory,’ arguing, against Husserl’s mythic return, for a dialectic of
the concept rather than a philosophy of consciousness (LTS 409). Merleau-
Ponty denied that consciousness could simply ‘possess’ (or naively refer to) the
lived experiences that exceeded it; indeed he claimed, further, that Husserl’s
ultimate hopes that it might, signaled the demise of the classical idea of reason
(S 192). The original is not all behind us: by coherent deformation it is always
and only figured and refigured. Merleau-Ponty, too, acknowledged the need
to surpass “the philosophy of consciousness which (Husserl’s thought) took

28  The full text from a working note at the outset of The Visible and the Invisible empha-
sizes its internal irony: the philosophy of the Lebenswelt, “our construction (in the mode
of ‘logic’) makes us rediscover this world of silence. Rediscovery in what sense? Was it
already there? How can we say that it was there since nobody knew it before the phi-
losopher said it?—But it is true that it was there: everything we said and say did and
does involve it.” (VI 170). This dialectical extension in which language would not be the
contrary of silence depended upon the claim that the significative potential of operative
language resists fixed or static analysis, the sayable exceeds the said, and that, at least
with respect to such figurative or poetic extension, “meaning is always ironic” (PW 30).
Merleau-Ponty‘s revamping of the fluidity or plasticity of the speculative dialectic (his
‘hyperdialectic’) brought him closer to early Hegel and, I have argued, Hegel’s Romantic
predecessors.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 51

itself to be at first.”29 Both had seemingly been provoked, then, by a similar

antinomy, even, to use Cavaillès term a “dilemma” in classical phenomenology:
consciousness versus logic, reflective concept versus the silence of the lived.
But they concurred perhaps on more than either would know, or more, in any
case, than we standardly think. Both also concurred in exposing the rudiments
of a rational history, what Cavaillès called “the progressive rational develop-
ment” avoided by Husserl (LTS 403). But even Cavaillès wondered whether we
might exceed the dilemma Husserl bequeathed. In this sense they had already
struck out on the tack Cavaillès once suggested, one often omitted by his inter-
preters: “Perhaps further phenomenological investigation will at least permit
us to challenge a dilemma so bluntly posed (brutalement posé)” (LTS 401).
Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès concurred that Husserl’s attempt to derive a
science of the lifeworld ultimately foundered. Husserl had hoped to convert
the “style” of the sensible into founding an “essentially lawful set of types”
(K 31, 173). For both, the reduction at stake remained incomplete. On the one
hand, Cavaillès’ declared, mathematical experience would be infinitely trans-
formed; no more than any other experience could it succumb to static itera-
tions perduring through “the logical chains of the centuries” (K 365). On the
other hand, Merleau-Ponty declared, Husserl’s quest for a transcendental
aesthetic had encountered the problem of finite sensorialité itself (PhP 241):
the sensible, too, (even the logicist’s Bedeutung) involved the opening upon “a
question which is obscurely expressed” and which I will never finish interrogat-
ing (PhP 214).30 Rather than identity or possession, the zero point of lived pres-
ence, immanent Urerlebnis, “sensoriality = transcendence” (VI 219). In either
case, Husserl’s phenomenology, would be subject to “coherent deformation.”
Both Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès questioned the reductionist correlate of
the transcendental reduction: alternately they called into question, whether
as transcendental logic or transcendent aesthetic, the simple correlate of a
determinate manifold. Husserl’s dream for a transcendental consciousness as
vehicle for an “analytics of all possible categorialia” (FTL 138) may not have
been “over” (K 389). Indeed it may not have been simply a dream, as those such

29  Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,” in The

Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Alden Fisher (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World 1969), 84.
30  The failure to acknowledge the problem of such interrogation, to be ignorant of “the prob-
lem of finitude under pain of failing to understand itself as philosophy” is the Phenom­
enology’s original charge against Spinoza as a philosophy of analytic reflection: “the
infinite thought discovered as immanent in perception would not be the culminating
point of consciousness, but on the contrary a form of unconsciousness” (PhP 38).

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52 Watson

as Thao or Suzanne Bachelard suggested: while “the ideal cannot be realized;

nevertheless it retains its value as such.”31 But, as Merleau-Ponty and Cavaillès’
works exemplify, if phenomenology did not lie in ruins, it had become con-
ceptually complicated, indeed polyvalent. For both Cavaillès and for Merleau-
Ponty it became inherently historical. In Cavaillès’ case, it required that we
articulate the developmental progress of the rational he claimed Husserl had
avoided. And, in Merleau-Ponty’s case, without denying the structural his-
tory of interrogation itself, it led him, somewhat ironically, to wonder at times
about the very claim of scientific progress with respect to the opening Husserl
had bequeathed.32 But both denied that the transcendental correlate at stake
within this history could be ultimately ‘dominated,’ possessed or finished—
nor, perhaps, for the same reason, be simply surpassed.33

Abbreviations

Works by Jean Cavaillès

CL Cavaillès’ letters, cited in Gabrielle Ferriès, trans. T.N.F. Murtah, Jean

Cavaillès, A Philosopher in Time of War 1903–1944 (Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2000)
LTS “On Logic and the Theory of Science”, trans. Theodore J. Kisiel in
Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans and
Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
OC Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Hermann, 1994)

Works by Edmund Husserl

FTL Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1978)
ITC The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, ed. Martin
Heidegger, trans. James S Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1964). This is a translation of the 1928 edition known to both

31  Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, 222n4.1. See Suzanne
Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Lester Embree
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 53 (citing Thao), 127–130.
32  See for example, PP 190.
33  Research for this article has been supported by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal
Arts, the University of Notre Dame.

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“ Philosophy is also an Architecture of Signs ” 53

Cavaillès and Merleau-Ponty and cited in the latter’s Phenomenology

of Perception.
K 
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern Press, 1970)

Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

AD  Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1973)
GN “Reading Notes and Comments on Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of
Consciousness, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé, trans. Elizabeth Lacey and Ted
Toadvine. Husserl Studies 17 (2001)
IP  L’Institution, la Passivité: Notes de cours au Collège de France 1954–1955,
ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris:
Belin, 2003)
IPP In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild & James M. Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1963)
N  Nature: Course Notes From the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003)
NC Notes de cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, ed. Stéphanie
Ménasé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
PhP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (revised by Forrest
Williams) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962)
PP  The Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological
Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)
PW The Prose of the World, trans John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973)
S  Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964)
T Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans. John
O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
SB  The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press,
1963)
VI  The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: North­
western University Press, 1968)

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