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Douglas LowUniversity of West Florida
Section
1 Education
Section 2 Teaching
Library Faculty/Reference: Library Reference:
Philosophy Faculty:
Full-time, tenured, Urbana University of Ohio. September 1987 to
August 2000. Promoted to
Full Professor
May 2000. Promoted to Associate Professor
and received tenure in May 1993. Section 3 AdministrationActing Head of Reference:
Curriculum Development: Designed, with Dr. Scott Fisher, and
implemented Section 4 Publications
Books 1.) Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of the Visible and the Invisible.
2.) The Existential Dialectic of Marx and Merleau-Ponty. New
York, Peter Lang Publishers, 1987. Journal Articles 1.) “The Body of Merleau-Ponty's Work as a Developing Whole.” International Philosophical Quarterly, 2009. Forthcoming. 2.)
“Merleau-Ponty
and Postmodernism.”
Analecta Husserliana. Papers published from The 3.) “Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy: Method and Ground, A Comprehensive Overview.” Phenomenological Inquiry, Volume 31, 2007. 4.) “Merleau-Ponty's Criticism of Derrida.” Phenomenological Inquiry, Volume 30, 2006. 5.) “Merleau-Ponty Between Sartre and Postmodernism.” Journal of Philosophical Research, Volume 31, 2006, pp. 343-360. 6.) “The Continuing
Relevance of The Structure of Behavior.” International
Philosophical Quarterly, September 2004, pp.
411-430. 7.) “Merleau-Ponty on Scientific Revolutions.” Philosophy Today, Winter 2002, pp. 373-383. 8.) “Merleau-Ponty’s
Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism.” Philosophy Today, 9.) “Merleau-Ponty’s
Criticism of Phenomenology of Perception.” International Studies in 10.) “Moral Conflict for the Film Librarian.” Journal of Information Ethics, Fall 2002, pp. 33-45. 11.) “Merleau-Ponty on Truth, Language and Value.” Philosophy Today, Spring, 2001, pp. 69-76. 12.) “Merleau-Ponty
and the Liberal/Communitarian Debate.” Journal of Philosophical 13.) “Merleau-Ponty
and the Foundations of Multiculturalism.” Journal of Philosophical 14.) “The Foundations of Merleau-Ponty's
Ethical Theory.” Human Studies,
Vol. 17, 1994, 15.) “Merleau-Ponty's
Concept of Reason.” Journal of
Philosophical Research, Vol. XIX, 16.)
“The Continuity Between Merleau-Ponty's Early and
Late Philosophy of Language.” Journal of Philosophical Research,
Vol. XVII, 1992, pp. 287-311. 17.)
“Merleau-Ponty's Intertwined Notions of
Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity.” International Studies in Philosophy,
Vol. XXIV/3, 1992, pp. 45-64. 18.)
“The Existential Dialectic of Marx and Merleau-Ponty.”
Philosophy Research Archives, Vol. XI, March 1986,
pp. 491-511. Article that appears as a
chapter in a book 1.)
“Marx and the Concept of the Individual.” Invited paper, Conference on the Individual in Western Civilization, Article Online 1.)
“The Relevancy of Merleau-Ponty’s Political Theory.” May 2003. Section 5 Academic Areas
Section 6 Interview
Interview with Sadiq Akoriji of the Broward Q: What is
the significance of Merleau-Ponty writings to
contemporary philosophy? A: This is
an important question, for Merleau-Ponty’s works
mark out an important space between the more extreme positions now
labeled Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism in philosophy, which begins
with Descartes in the early 1600’s and extends to about 1850, can be
characterized by its focus on the isolated individual and its belief in one
form of rationality, a rationality that was thought to match the very
structure of one rational world. Postmodernism, which begins (in spirit if not in name) in the mid
1800’s with the works of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Marx, rightfully
questions the assumptions of Modernism, and it is now widely held that there
are multiple forms of rationality, not just one, and that the self is formed
in social interaction. This view has been extended to an extreme by 20th
and 21st Century philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Modernism also held that thought was
formed independently of language. Language was conceived as an incidental
vehicle for this already formed thought. We now know that language is
necessary for thought, that it helps accomplish it. This is the sort of thing
that Derrida takes to the extreme. For he claims that language forms all
thought and meaning. He, of course,
does not deny the existence of the world or of our perceptual encounter with
it, but he does say that words refer only to other words and not to the world
outside of us. He also claims that language is a trace of the perceptual that
erases its original connection to that trace. Merleau-Ponty
comes between these two more extreme positions. On the one hand, he, like
others, has argued that there are multiple forms of rationality, not just
one. Yet, on the other hand, he argues that forms of reason are not entirely
arbitrary. As the philosopher of live embodiment, he argues that since
human bodies are similar (not identical, for no two people are exactly the
same), that they will open perceptually upon the world in similar ways.
Moreover, since the world’s structures do not change radically from moment to
moment, they reveal themselves to human beings in stable and predictable
ways. There is certainly no definitive rational interpretation of the world,
for nature is inexhaustible and open to a variety of interpretations, but
since the world is relatively stable, some interpretations will tend to fit
better than others. To offer one of Merleau-Ponty’s
examples, if I say that a certain cliff face is climbable, whether or not
this interpretation fits or works depends upon the
actual structure of the cliff and its relationship to the human body. For Merleau-Ponty, then, there is a sort of perceptual logos
or structure that is not arbitrary. It is concrete, open and changing, but it
is not arbitrary or haphazard, for it follows the relatively stable structure
of the perceived world. In addition, Merleau-Ponty
fully accepts the idea that the self is formed in social interaction,
including with the help of language, but he also insists that this self
awareness is rooted in the structure of the body. As I see and touch the world
around me, I am aware of being seen and touched from the outside. Since
consciousness is the body's openness upon the world and since the body is
reflexive, since it turns back upon itself (the hand touches from the inside
because it is touched from the outside), I am aware of being in the world and
that I am perceptible to others who are also within it. This means that human
consciousness is intimately associated with self-consciousness and that
self-consciousness necessarily involves a public dimension, which is infused
with language. The sense of self thus forms in social interaction, including
with the help of language, but after all, there is something there to form,
our embodied perceptual openness upon a public world. Q: In the
preface of your book recent book, Merleau-Ponty’s
Last Vision [Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2000] you
state that your book is an attempt to complete Merleau-Ponty’s
book The Visible and the Invisible. [ A: I
approached this task with a great deal of apprehension, for,
after all, it is ultimately impossible to speak for another human being,
particularly one with Merleau-Ponty’s unique
genius. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty admits, we do
individuate from our shared experiences and our shared bodily structures.
Therefore no one can ever literally experience the experience of another.
Yet since my individual life rests upon the general (and therefore shared)
structures of the body, and since my consciousness is experienced primarily
as opening upon a public world, my individual life crosses into life and
experience in general. It is in this way that I am able to glimpse the
experience of another person---that is, because our bodies are similar,
because our experiences open upon a public world in similar ways, because
our embodied consciousnesses meet and overlap at the objects in the world,
like search lights illuminating objects where they rest, I can capture a glimpse of another person's
experience. So even though I can never speak
for another person in exactly the way he or she would speak for him or
herself, if the other is unable to speak, I can perhaps approximate the
other's intentions. We are, after all, able to understand each other, and if
we can understand each other, we can to a certain extent speak for each
other---for there are general structures of experience that all can
understand. More specifically, to answer your question,
once I had seen that Merleau-Ponty’s lecture notes
from the last period of his life, the period in which he was also writing The
Visible and the Invisible, almost exactly matched the book’s outlined yet
incomplete chapters, I felt an obligation to try to
pull the works together. Merleau-Ponty was without
a doubt one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers. He must
be placed in the company of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Dewey. The fact that
he died at the relatively young age of fifty-three was a great tragedy for
the philosophical community, and since his philosophy was deeply concerned
with everyday life and ordinary people, with democracy for all, it was a great tragedy for the world
community as well. No one can speak exactly for Merleau-Ponty,
but what I tried to do was use his own works, his lectures and late essays,
to allow him to more fully speak for himself, to use his own words to bring
his own rather remarkable works to a more complete expression. Since I
decided to go ahead with the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s
Last Vision, I obviously think that the book makes a contribution to this
end. It of course is now in the hands of readers and critics who must come to
that judgment, or not, on their own. Q: Why do you
think that the question of philosophy according to Merleau-Ponty
should change from “who am I” to “What is there?” A: This
relates back to your first question about Merleau-Ponty’s
contribution to contemporary philosophy. I think that his idea that
consciousness is not a hermetically sealed entity in full possession of one rationality but a tentative embodied openness upon
the world and others is an important shift away from the individualism and
ethnocentrism of Western philosophy and Western culture in general. We live in the
world in a provisional way, and we live there with other people and other
cultures. True, we must ground truth and values in our own experiences and
reflections, but we must also, since we are social creatures who live in a shared world, check our beliefs
against those held by others as we open upon the world together. It is out of this cross-checking, and hopefully
out of non-coercive debate and dialogue, with other people and other
cultures, including with our past, that we should form our truths and values. Q: Merleau-Ponty focuses on the idea of the body as a thing
among things, and yet he considers it as the source of knowledge. What are
your comments on this? A: Merleau-Ponty is responding to a philosophical tradition
that defined nature as a thing purely in itself and consciousness or
the mind as purely for itself. He believed that the human body was a
third kind of thing, an amalgam of body and mind. As I have already
mentioned, for him consciousness is the body’s awareness of and openness upon
the world. The human body is a thing like other things, for it has thickness,
weight, and opaqueness, yet it is the thing that allows us to be aware of and
perceive other things and that can never itself be fully perceived as a
thing, since the act of perception can never be fully captured as an object. It is the thing that holds other things in
awareness around it. As Merleau-Ponty says in the
posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, it is our embodiment or our
flesh that gives us access to the world and its embodiment. This does not
mean that the world senses us the way that we sense it, but it does mean that
we are encrusted in the world through our bodies, that there is no clear
distinction between where it ends and where we begin, that we belong to each
other inextricably, and that our perception of nature is ultimately its
perception of itself through the human body, for the human body is a
development and expression of it. Q: In his
essay “Eye and Mind” [in Primacy of Perception, A: Yes, Merleau-Ponty does celebrate painting, and in his last
text he states that vision must remain the philosophers
model of knowledge, but he also accords a very special place to language in
his later philosophy. It goes something like this. Perception already
stylizes, is already a "going beyond," already organizes scattered bits of nature in a
meaningful way. If, for example, I perceive the well know gestalt figure the
can appear as a vase or as two faces in profile, I spontaneously organize the
physical lines on the page as either a vase or as two faces. Something is
clearly added by the embodied perceiver here, for the physical lines can be
"stylized" or interpreted in either of these two ways. Yet this is a
"going beyond" the data that remains in contact with them, the actual
lines perceived, and with the embodied perceiver. In this case, then,
perception is already an expression, the creation of a meaning that is still
rooted in the world and our bodies. Merleau-Ponty
believes that painting is a prolongation of this already oriented movement
and expression of meaning. Painting stylizes. It organizes lines, colors, and
the perceptual world in a meaningful way. He also believes that speech, in turn,
is a prolongation of perception, that the writer creates meaning in much the
same way as the painter, that is, by taking up a meaning that is already
present in events and taking it further, by organizing and stylizing it in a
unique way. Language, then, is a sublation of the
perceptual, for it takes it up and expresses it at a higher level of
integration. Thus even though much of the origin of meaning is in the body’s
perceptual encounter with the world, language is required to more fully
separate meaning from its contingent structures. Language helps us escape the
contingent, helps us form abstractions and more general meanings. Painting
cannot paint about itself, certainly not in the way that language can speak
or write about itself. Nor can painting integrate past styles in a present
work, certainly not in the way that language can integrate past philosophies
or literary themes in present works. Language can free us from our past and
yet summarize it and integrate it with new forms of present creation. In
general, then, as Merleau-Ponty says, what makes
human language and linguistic culture unique is not that they form a second structure or
nature above or beyond nature, but that they can continue to help us create new
structures, structures that are rooted in perception yet that also sublate it, take it up and integrate it at higher levels.
Painting cannot accomplish this prodigious task. Q: What’s
the place of language in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
knowing that he opposes the Derridian notion of the
literary text as a free play of signs in which the signifiers refer only to
other signifiers. A: As I
just mentioned, language is a sublation of our
perceptual encounter with the world. It takes up the open and referential
patterns of the perceived and articulates them more precisely. Language gives
expression to or sings our encounter with the world and others. Perception
does not cause or logically require a certain expression. It suggests it, as,
to use a metaphor that Rollo May uses in a
completely different context, a violin string suggests the sounds of the
other instruments in the orchestra by echoing and vibrating with them.
By vibrating with the rhythms of the world, by echoing its rhythms, forms and patterns, as it actively helps form them,
perceptual gestures and rhythms can also suggest and slip into the rhythms of speech and
language. Language, in turn, helps articulate the perceived, takes it up, expresses it more fully
and determinately, and yet also more openly and generally. The light of
language is needed for perception to be so expressed. Yet language shines
back a light that has been originally suggested by the perceived. While
Derrida does not deny our perceptual contact with the world, he certainly
does not attempt to do the important work of trying to integrate this contact
with language. The beginning of this integration has been accomplished by Merleau-Ponty. |
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