Merleau-ponty's Existential Conception of Science

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 that 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. But when Merleau-Ponty spoke of 'science' in this way, 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 himself was admittedly ambivalent about this possibility, and he rarely thematized scientific research in the course of his investigations. The aim of this paper, 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. Already in La Structure du Comportement, Merleau-Ponty insisted that the concept of 'structure' or 'form' employed by the Gestalt psychologists must be extended to the physical sciences as well: But in reality, what Kohler shows with a few examples ought to be extended to all physical laws: they express a structure and have meaning only within this structure. Merleau-Ponty's argument for this claim will be familiar to philosophers of science. The concepts and laws developed in science cannot be attached to the world one-by-one, but only as a structural whole, because any attempt to match physical law or theory with the world brings into play a host of other theories and theoretically informed descriptions of initial conditions. The physical experiment is never the revelation of an isolated causal series: one verifies that the observed effect indeed obeys the presumed law by taking into account