Abstract
Merleau-Ponty’s radical reflection conceptualizes the transcendental and the empirical as intertwined, emerging only via an écart. I advance this concept of transcendental empirical écart by studying the problem of measurement in science, in both general and quantum mechanical contexts. Section one analyses scientific problems of measurement, focusing on issues of temporality, to show how measurement entails a transcendental that diverges with the empirical. Section two briefly interprets this result via Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth, to indicate how measurement reveals a temporality that is not an already given ground that would guarantee the transcendental in advance: temporality is instead ‘deep,’ itself engendering a divergence of transcendental and empirical operations that first allows for measurement and sense.
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Notes
The transcendental-empirical relationship surfaces repeatedly in PhP. See especially the long discussion of Kant and the a priori and a posteriori in the “Sensing” chapter, and the last parts of the “Others” chapter.
In Merleau-Ponty (1964).
In VI, cf. e.g., the note of May 20, 1959, which criticizes Sartre and Bergson as basing the subject, reflection and transcendental in an all too abstract nothingness; this leads (via the “hollow”), to écart as the third term between subject and object. The December 1959 note on “World” links écart to diacritical differentiation, and the May 1960 note on “Flesh of the World,” speaks of a self that is by écart. For this paper, perhaps the most appropriate reference is the long note on “Perception—Movement” (January 1960), on perception beginning in the embryo as a certain “fundamental écart” emerging within the hollow of being that embryogenesis prepares. This is what I am getting at: écart as an operation engendering chiasmic relations.
Cf. Lawlor (2006), ch. 6, on Merleau-Ponty’s “mixturism” of terms such as the transcendental and the empirical. Such a mixture does not combine already determinate terms, these emerge only via écart. “Divergence” is a translation meant to capture écart as a relation in which terms separate only as chiasmatically intertwined with one another.
In “Classical and Modern Physics,” in the first course (1956–1957) on “The Concept of Nature.”.
Adamson (2005) draws on Merleau-Ponty to emphasize how embodiment is crucial to measurement as coupling us, via instruments, to measured objects. Johncock (2011) links Merleau-Ponty’s challenges to subject/object, inside/outside divisions, to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, drawing his points about quantum mechanics from Barad (2007). My effort is to advance ontological themes in Merleau-Ponty, via measurement as an opening to issues crucial to radical reflection. My approach and concern comes close to Vallier (2001), who briefly touches on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of quantum mechanics in the nature lectures, in relation to the focus on signification and sense from SB onward.
Pattee (1977).
Note that this distinction between rate dependent and rate independent aspects already raises complications reflecting conceptual issues below, since the process of reading DNA as rate independent is in fact rate dependent and subject to variation. Pattee (2005) addresses some of these points.
As Pattee (1977) puts it, “we must further restrict our model of a complex system to remove the case of the external observer reading a message that is not really in the system itself.” (262).
Measurement is an embodied operation that couples with what is measured, as Adamson (2005) emphasizes. The question is how this embodied operation is not just a physical movement, but has a sense. Also note that Kant’s distinction between intensive and extensive measures, through his example of light, is in the background here.
Cf. Pattee (2005) on von Neumann’s distinction between copying by inspection and copying by description; measuring A via B is kin to copying by inspection.
Cf. Socrate’s argument in Phaedo that equality is not in the length of sticks themselves, but in something beyond them. The analysis here critizes this transcendent beyond.
Cf. Husserl’s argument that writing down is necessary for idealization, discussed in Merleau-Ponty (2002).
Cf. Pattee (1977, p. 262): “a measuring device results in a detailed record of an event that does not depend on any detailed knowledge of the measuring device itself”; “the more you describe the measuring device, the less effectively it measures or describes the system”; also Pattee (2005) “the results of measurement,” which are “timeless semantic information,” “cannot be usefully described by…time-dependent reversible laws.”.
The argument here is analogous to Kant’s transcendental argument that space cannot be derived from or composed out of spatial givens, since these givens can be given as multiple, determinate data only in virtue of an already given spatial manifold that would allow their givenness as determinate spatial data.
I am trying to avoid conceptualizing the transcendental as a thing or idea, etc. This is why I call it an operation: it is a doing that effects a certain kind of determinate differentiation.
See note 24.
This conception of an activity that does not traverse moments of an already specifiable trajectory, but rather creates the context in which it stands as movement, is at stake in in MSME’s analysis of movement as key to sense. Altogether this reveals that measurement inherently links passivity (exposure of ourselves and our instruments to timebound dynamics) to activity (something we introduce that is not reducible to passivity). Measurement, sense, activity/passivity are in close proximity.
Evan Thompson (2007, 54–57) discusses Pattee’s work in relation to enactivism and Bateson, connecting it to Merleau-Ponty’s work on organisms, to emphasize how we must understand meaning as arising within organisms as autonomous meaning constructors. I am pushing Pattee further, to pursue the ontological point that we must understanding meaning as ultimately arising within deep temporality, versus following from an already fixed law or rate, etc.
For these points about SB, cf. Vallier (2001). SB is animated by a tension between the invocation of nature as causal system in the very first sentence, and the discovery in chapters 2 and 3 that living systems must be understood in relation to significations.
Pattee himself notes how the quantum mechanical issue further pressures and complicates the relation between time and the timeless as key to measurement.
Al-Khalili and McFadden (2014) gives an too popular and partisan account of some of these claims.
London and Bauer (1983) is a classic paper on quantum mechanics, central to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. French (2002) shows how Husserl is in the background of London and Bauer. Reichenbach (1944) gives a lucid and rigorous introduction. Entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are also helpful, e.g., Ismael (2014), Krips (2013), Faye (2014). Johncock (2011) reviews some of the background via Barad (2007), and Bitbol (2002) also provides an introduction.
The results described here also obtain with electrons, and perhaps with other entities.
The fact that there are multiple interpretations of the quantum mechanical result is conceptually and methodologically significant. (The Wikipedia article “Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics,” consulted on 15 January 2015, lists 19 interpretations.) Not only does the problem of measurement push us to the transcendental level, the very interpretation of the problem in the quantum mechanical case already involves conceptual moves that cannot be decided below the transcendental philosophical level. Measurement is a place where issues of interpretation arise in science that cannot be settled by mere fact, where science encounters its installation in a human and pre-scientific dimension.
Bitbol (2002).
Merleau-Ponty (1970, p. 154).
Cf. Vallier (2001). Note a very strong convergence here between the description of measurement activity, and Merleau-Ponty’s description of expression.
This is emphasized in MSME, esp. in the seventh lesson—with regard to perceived movement. But the discussion of perceived movement there connects with discussions of organismic development and movement in LN, and together these show that Merleau-Ponty is trying to get clues to ontology from the study of movement. Vanzago (2010) brings out some of these issues.
But see note 24.
Recent scholarship shows that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in temporality is not just in experience and time consciousness, but in ontology, cf. e.g., Kelly (2015).
These explorations find support in Collona (2002), which argues that “simultaneity” is a key concept in Merleau-Ponty, one that designates the way in which past, present and future are not already given in a fixed dimension, but are rather emergent with one another, in a simultaneity that is not an abstract being together of all things in one moment. On this view, simultaneity is differenciation. I am trying to push this kind of thought further, because we need to be thinking differenciation itself as engendering the latitude to differenciate, as not being an already given type of change or way of being simultaneous. This is what I am trying to work out under the heading of “deep temporality.” Also see Chouraqui (2011), which connects Merleau-Ponty’s concept of time to depth via discussion of the role of thickness in his notes to VI, and Mazis (2010).
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Morris, D. Measurement as transcendental–empirical écart: Merleau-Ponty on deep temporality. Cont Philos Rev 50, 49–64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9392-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9392-2