Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty
on Narrative Identity
We tell stories because in the last analysis
human lives need and merit being narrated.-- Paul Ricoeur
What is encouraging in this effort is that there
is no pure and absolutely unexpressed life in man.-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
There has been much discussion lately as to the proper place of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the various dialogues of postmodern thought. Some scholars argue that Merleau-Ponty should be part of this dialogue because of his attempt to overcome modern dualism and subjectivism;(1) others, meanwhile, have engaged Merleau-Ponty in fruitful dialogues with Derrida.(2) There is even the assertion that "Merleau-Ponty's logic of visibility cannot be read now independently of Derrida's logic of supplementarity."(3) Alternatively, there is the counter-claim that Merleau-Ponty's thought does not neatly fall into either a modernist or postmodernist camp and that we should simply assent to the ambiguity of his unique philosophical perspective.(4)In this paper, I am not interested necessarily in contributing to this repartee. What is of interest is the close approximation in Merleau-Ponty's works of a topic current in the postmodern moment, namely, what Paul Ricoeur today calls narrative identity.
Although the topic of narrative identity is not thematized in Merleau-Ponty's thought, many of the key elements that Ricoeur weaves into his hermeneutical discussion on narrative identity such as the lived body, the tension of linguistic sedimentation and innovation and the act of reading that are not tangential to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological thought.
In what follows, I discuss some of these elements between the two French authors, concluding that Merleau-Ponty's recognition of le soi ambigu is dramatically close to what Ricoeur has in mind when he employs the term l'identité narrative. While this approximation in itself does not make Merleau-Ponty's philosophy postmodern, it does at least reinforce the fact that Merleau-Ponty's thought should not be dismissed prematurely.
To ensure that a dialogue between these two thinkers on the topic of narrative identity is not a forced one, I would like to make a further comment. Paul Ricoeur has given us two installments on explaining what is involved in stating that identity is a function of narrative, namely, Time and Narrative (1984-1988)(5) and Oneself as Another (1990).(6) While I will borrow from the many refinements made in this latter work, I am primarily interested in following Ricoeur's notion of narrative identity with regard to the two dynamic processes of emplotment and reading as articulated initially in Time and Narrative. Ricoeur commonly refers to these dynamisms as the "world of the text" and the "world of the reader." There are two reasons for this preference.
First, as Ricoeur noted himself, the notion of narrative identity as presented in Time and Narrative was only an "intuitive apprehension" of such an identity.(7) This is attested to by the fact that the topic of narrative identity appears only in the conclusion to this major work, conclusions that were written a full year after the completion of Time and Narrative.(8) To use Ricoeur's own terms, narrative identity was a "fragile offshoot"(9) of the diverse studies in the work whose aim was not necessarily to delineate such an identity. Narrative identity seems to have been the unforeseen fruit of his long standing hermeneutical principle that any self-understanding would be one mediated by signs, symbols, and texts. If such a notion of identity arose unexpectedly for Ricoeur, there is little reason to doubt why its approximate appearance, as an intuitive apprehension, could not arise in other philosophers, such as Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenological research Ricoeur draws upon. In short, in this paper, I do not argue that Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty converge on the topic of narrative identity at the level of ontology that Ricoeur specifically pursues at the end of Oneself as Another; rather, that any convergence occurs because of the links that exist between phenomenology and hermeneutics, links that are readily discernible at the level of emplotment and reading found in Time and Narrative. This leads to my second preference for keeping the discussion at the level of emplotment and reading.
Ricoeur has remarked that phenomenology is the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics and that it too interrupts "lived experience in order to signify it."(10) While he has elaborated extensively the grafting of phenomenology to hermeneutics and vice versa, Merleau-Ponty's place in the hermeneutical tradition has only been recently studied.(11) As is well known, Merleau-Ponty went to great lengths to distance himself from the idealist interpretation of phenomenology Husserl presented in Ideen I and in the Cartesian Meditations. In the Phenomenology of Perception and succeeding works, one sees in Merleau-Ponty the deliberate attempt to overcome the dualistic definition of meaning, truth, and self from the side of subjectivity alone. Rather, such categories are themselves mediated linguistically. In regard to the self-understanding, for example, Merleau-Ponty states that the subject "provides itself with symbols of itself in both succession and multiplicity, and that these symbols are it, since without them it would, like an inarticulate cry, fail to achieve self-consciousness."(12) In other words, when we speak of meaning and the self, we are speaking about interrogation and interpretation.
This interpretation, however, is always identified first with the embodied subject as the singular seat of interpretation. Given the primacy of perception, the personal incarnate subject always begins by finding him or herself immersed in meaning. This meaning, in turn, is not textually encoded and appropriated by reading. It is, rather, a sanction of perspective, a lived perspective that cannot be discursively clarified in a definitive manner. At the level of the phenomenal body, existence is first lived; it is only secondarily contemplated and its meaning elaborated through language. The result is that " ... the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible," and "what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite one with my self."(13) It is only through repeated instances of authentic expression that we attempt to transcend our perspectival finitude. Meaning, therefore, for the incarnate subject, will always be ambiguous in the "everything we live or think has always several meanings (sens)."(14) While "speech implants the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort,"(15) behind language there is no immutable transcendent thought, rather, language is the "ever-recreated opening in the plenitude of being" such that any cultural project of knowledge and meaning is necessarily open-ended and incomplete.(16)
As such, we do not have to look too deeply to find strong hermeneutical evidence of narrative identity in Merleau-Ponty, rather, it seems to invite itself. I will briefly detail what I believe Ricoeur means by narrative identity at the level of emplotment, discuss the strongest point of intersection between Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, that is the notion of 'I can,' and, finally, textually elaborate the notion of narrative identity in Merleau-Ponty.
I. Narrative Identity
The central thesis of Time and Narrative is the existence of an assumed reciprocity between narrativity and temporality. The experience of "human" time - a third time that stands in contrast to cosmic time and a purely phenomenological time - appears to us through the narrative formation of discourse. Stories told or read articulate this third time, configure it, giving it the form of human experience. In the reception of each narrative, read or listened to, we are confronted with so many alternatives of how experience is temporalized. This configuration, however, is not static. The continual exigency of acting and suffering takes place in time and enlarges experience. Narrative is nourished by such exigencies and the passage of time. As (cosmic) time feeds narrativity, narrativity temporalizes experience thereby thematizing time as the central characteristic of the human condition.(17) Each configuration of human time through narrative, therefore, is a prelude to its forthcoming refiguration in light of the experiences of the reader.
Astonishingly, Ricoeur treated the temporal quality of experience as the common reference of both history and fiction. Both the time of fiction and historical time find themselves mediated by the narrative function. Where historical time calls for a certain fictionalization in service of its own intentions to stand for the past, the narrative voice of fiction is quasi-historical to the extent that the unreal events it recounts are past facts.(18)
The shift to a narrative conception of personal identity appears in the midst of a dynamic dialectic that exists between the signals provided by a narrative text and the act of reading.
On the side of the author and the text is the role of emplotment (muthos). This is the way in which we arrange events and action that give a sense of wholeness to the story with a beginning and an end. Emplotment is what makes a story intelligible. Emplotment, under the aegis of what Ricoeur calls narrative intelligence or understanding,(19) is the ability to take discordant events and heterogeneous episodes of human action and tie them together into a coherent plot, permitting a concordant readability to our lives. The construction of plots is the place where events become episodes and episodes become the stuff of stories. The manifold of events are drawn into the unity of one temporal whole.
When the questions 'Who acts and suffers?' and 'who tells their story of tragedy, of joy?' are posed, a particular narrative category is recognized, namely, that of character. Each narrative is a recounting of someone being and doing - of undergoing and enduring. In answering the questions 'Who endures?' and 'Who undergoes?,' Ricoeur's response is predicated on the assertion that actions are performed by someone. That someone is always a self, a characterized self that never stands over and against the exigency of acting and suffering. As Ricoeur concisely states, "to say self is not to say I." Where "the I is posited, the self is implied reflexively."(20) It is only in the telling our individual stories, over time, that a durable character becomes recognizable as belonging to a certain family, locality, tradition and culture - all of which are enmeshed in a complex web of prior stories that make up the narrative heritage of our great works, epics, tragedies, dramas, and novels handed down to us by our culture.
Hence, as a story arises from the emplotment of action, character arises in transferring the plot to the identity that unfolds as the story unfolds. Such a narrative identity will only be known correlative to the discordant concordance of the story itself.(21) In short, characters "are themselves plots."(22)
Human actions, the emplotment of action and character, and the identity of those who act and suffer are all dynamic referents. Identities that are expressed and shaped by narratives are not stable entities. Different plots and agendas erupt to make and unmake an identity because narrative identity is not established on the basis of an "indecomposable cogito" or an "impermeable unitive substance." Narrative identity is a receptive referent where an act of listening or reading is a possible provocation to be and act differently.(23)
On the other side of the dialectic, that of the reader, one sees that a text and its reader stand in a synergetic relation. A text sets up a novel space of indeterminacy for the reader where normal expectations are suspended and other variations on themes, dilemmas, and crisis are presented. The text provides a world to be inhabited by the reader; it creates a distance from the everyday world of the reader by "depragmatizing" it.(24) In doing so, the narrowed and hard categories that define the world of the reader are broken-open, possibly presenting levels of meaning not previously perceived. Normal expectations and memories of the empirical world are not just denoted but transformed. As the text disorients the reader, the reader, in struggling with the text, and applying imaginative variations, actively invite a re-orientation to being-in-the-world.
Reading appears by turns as an interruption in the course of action and as a new impetus to action. These two perspectives on reading result directly from its functions of confrontation and connection between imaginary world of the text and the actual world of readers. To the extent that readers subordinate their expectations to those developed by the text, they themselves become unreal to a degree comparable to the unreality of the fictive world toward which they emigrate. ... This fragile union can be expressed in the following paradox: the more readers become unreal in their reading, the more profound and far-reaching will be the work's influence on social reality.(25)
Subsequently, the effect of emplotment does not end with the text but with the reader. The significance of a story finds its springboard of change in what the reader brings to it. The world of the text and the world of the reader interpenetrate one another; as Ricoeur likes to quote from Gadamer, through a "fusion of horizons," the reader belongs to both the experiential horizon of the work imaginatively, and the horizon of his action concretely.(26) In this way, a work is transfiguring in that it points us toward what is outside of us, toward the practical field of worldly encounters.
Invited by the zones of indetermination and layers of interpretations embodied in a text, each unity of awareness embodied by the reader, from the temporal to the ethical, becomes open for refiguration.(27) "Refiguration" constitutes the "active re-organization of our being-in-the-world performed by the reader following the invitation of the text to become the reader of oneself."(28) Emploting, reading, and self-identification, therefore, are not pieces of a puzzle or fixed perches of rest but mediums we pass through in search of an answer to the elusive question of "who am I?"
II. "I can"
Before proceeding to see how Merleau-Ponty approximates the notion of narrative identity described above, some reference must be given to Ricoeur's dependency on a basic phenomenological observation that is genuinely Merleau-Pontyian.
In an early critique (1967) of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur once wrote that it was difficult to understand how "a philosophical act was possible if man is so completely identified with his insertion into his field of perception, action and life."(29) Thirty years later Ricoeur will tie together the fragmentary nature of his hermeneutics of the self under the general designation of the "analogical unity of action"(30) with some pre-eminence given to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of 'I can.' The 'I can' is Merleau-Ponty's summary of how one's own body generates, through its own actions, the possible field of action that 'I' can actualize.(31) Ricoeur incorporates the 'I can' because of his intention to understand narrative identity as the one which attests to his or her own acting and suffering.(32) Such an attestation is mute if it is impossible to distinguish the intentional intervention of self-reflecting agents in the course of worldly events.
To some degree, the early stages of both Ricoeur's Oneself as Another and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception have similar objectives. They both attempt to rescue the human subject from a solely empirical and intellectualistic understanding. In his introductory chapters, Ricoeur realizes that a strictly linguistic analysis, at the semantic and pragmatic levels, fails to express "the reflexive nature of the utterance by which the subject of discourse designates himself or herself."(33) At the semantic level, the person appears as a basic particular, that is, the one to whom one spoke and to whom one attributes psychical and physical attributes. At the level of pragmatics, the "I" and "you" are implied in the process of interlocution but the third person is excluded and never achieves a status above something spoken of as a thing among other things. What such an analysis fails to do, Ricoeur suggests, is to bridge the important gap between the person as a fact belonging to the world and a self that does not belong to the objects of which it speaks.(34)
This disappointment is further compounded when it is discovered that an analytic philosophy of action primarily focuses on what "counts" as an action among the events of the world. Human action is discussed in terms of something that occurs amongst other events. In order to maintain the consistency of the logical analysis, a rift develops between "what happens" and "what makes things happen."(35) The question of motive and cause therefore become problematic leading to the occultation of the role of agent. In other words, in striving to determine the descriptive status of actions, the question "who?" is subverted by the questions "what?" and "why?." The result is that to satisfy the constraints of such a logical analysis, the everyday experiences of being able to do something, that is, to be the source of an activity, is lost.
To re-link agency with human action and to save such actions from the severe reduction to types of events, Ricoeur pursues a discussion of "initiative." Initiative is a "primitive datum" that underlies the obscured link between action as something that happens and agents who make things happen. Initiative, Ricoeur asserts, "is an intervention of the agent of action in the course of the world, an intervention which effectively causes changes in the world."(36) The primitive datum of initiative only becomes recognizable, however, by uncovering the preunderstanding of what the lived body can do in the world different from the course of worldly events. The only conditions under which initiative would give rise to thought about itself would be the unique discourse of Merleau-Ponty's 'I can' and its direct affinity to one's own body. As Ricoeur states:
What would make this discourse based on the 'I can' a different discourse is, in the last analysis, its reference to an ontology of one's own body, that is, of a body which is also my body and which, by its double allegiance, to the order of physical bodies and to that of persons, therefore lies at the point of articulation of the power to act which is ours and of the course of things which belongs to the world order.(37)
In light of one's own body, the fact that Merleau-Ponty can assert that "... we have indeed always the power to interrupt, ... in any case the power to begin ..."(38) is crucial for Ricoeur. First, it signifies that as acting agents we can act as an original source of potential and power in the world. Second, a present action is something being done and not observed, that is, my action is an immediacy that thwarts its classification as an object of observation. Third, humans actions can be strategic ones where there is deliberate intervention into the course of worldly events. Fourth, it is agents who possess "the power-to-act" and the consequences of this power is imputable to a particular individual. Subsequently, it is no longer permitted to speak of things just happening in the world, rather, there is the historical present of someone acting, enduring, and bearing consequences. It is in the recording and recounting of this historical present wherein the identity of the one who acts finds its expression and further elaboration.(39)
In short, from Ricoeur's point of view, Merleau-Ponty's early exposition of the lived body is already a foundation for the possible elaboration of narrative identity. This unique way of être-au-monde is always being acted out and endured. It is this inescapable demand to act and to suffer, for Ricoeur, that demands narrative.
III. Narrative Identity in Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty rarely speaks of 'narrative' per se, as much as he comments on literature or literary language in general or the various categories of the prose such as novels and poems. Unlike Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty does not specifically point to the "narrative function" as the necessary condition for temporal experience and the reflective presence of the self to self. The latter's theory of interpretation is an "oblique" one.(40)
Moreover, at the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty did not leave behind a consolidated theory of language. There are a large number of texts where language, speech and literature are addressed but the entire field is never threaded together to create a whole.
However, on the positive side, the topic of narrative identity seems implicit to much of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Not only does he posit the necessity of the acting subject like Ricoeur insists above, but there is also the consistent reference to stories, as well as, the frequent insights into the author/reader relationship scattered throughout his various essays on the various levels of expression.(41) What follows is a composite of the relationship between the self and narrative that Merleau-Ponty seemed to entertain in his middle period.(42)
i) The Unfinished Self in the Phenomenology of Perception
One of the central themes in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is that the body-subject is not in the world like an object but as the active transcendence of the world. This active transcendence is driven by the gap that exists between the world of operative intentionality and thematic intentionality, between the tacit - silent - cogito and the incarnate subject. This tacit cogito is an original opening in the world and only obtains what Merleau-Ponty calls a "precarious grasp (une prise glissante) upon the world."(43) This precariousness is the result of our inability to definitively capture our prepersonal and phenomenal existence. As the lived body presumes a transcendence to the natural world through acts of expression, especially language, the incarnate subject fails to give a complete account of the subject of perception. This is why Merleau-Ponty characterizes human existence as essentially ambiguous; in the end, "this ambiguity (équivoque) cannot be resolved, but it can understood as ultimate, if we recapture the intuition of real time which preserves everything, and which is at the core of both proof and expression."(44)
This fundamental ambiguity translates itself into a constant openness at the level of the incarnate subject; openness to the meaning of our perceptions and to self-understanding. To recall Merleau-Ponty's general line of thought, it is only within a cultural world that "speech is able to settle into a sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human relationships,"(45) such that a thematized self can take on an identity appropriate to its own discovery in a linguistic community. It does not posit itself prior to language but realizes itself through language. For Merleau-Ponty, "man is a historical idea and not a natural species," so that it is only through "... speech itself [that] brings about the concordance between me and myself, and between myself and others, ... ."(46) While the self finds itself already situated in a world of signs, symbols, and texts, the self participates in "constitut[ing] a linguistic world and a cultural world."(47) As a self matures, reads, and listens, speaks, and observes, it learns various associations of words, situations, and objectivities until it acquires an identity and linguistic style for its own expressive needs.
Any signified "world," however, is an "'unfinished work'"(48) and it is not established once and for all. The body never stops "secreting itself a 'significance' upon its material surrounding, and communicating it to other embodied subjects"(49) such that my voluntary and rational life is given "a permanently tentative look."(50) As Merleau-Ponty concludes,
We must therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open indefinite power of giving significance (signifier) - that is, both apprehending and conveying a meaning (sens) - by which man transcends himself towards a new form of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and speech.(51)
This openness finds itself realized over and over again by authentic acts of expression that shatter sedimented levels of secondary speech and description. Authentic speech interpenetrates the natural world and language disavowing any fixed meaning given to one particular picture of the world and to ourselves. Even our identities are not fixed once and for all. "There is no privileged self-knowledge, and other people are no more closed systems than I am myself."(52) We live in tension between a generalized existence and individual projects that bestows both a situation to our identity and an openness. Hence, "...there is no case in which I am utterly committed"(53) and each of us possesses the means "to transcend ourselves."(54) Each act of authentic expression constantly makes and unmakes our identities, reestablishing them as our field of experiences are challenged and confronted by previous orientations and creative expressions.
From these gains other acts of authentic expression - the writer's, the artist's, or the philosopher's - are made possible. This ever-recreated opening in the plenitude of being is what conditions the child's first use of speech and the language of the writer, as it does the construction of the word and that of concepts.(55)
While Merleau-Ponty's preoccupation with the phenomenal realm and perception permitted him to inadvertently draw out an unfinished self - one that is quite antithetical to the stable substance of the Cartesian cogito - the actual dynamics of how xpression/ speech/ language/ literature configure identity is yet to be determined. In Ricoeur's terms, this means determining what type of relationship exists between the world of the text and world of the reader.
ii) Narrativity and Identity.
Concern with narrative (literary language), and the text-reader relationship was of central importance to Merleau-Ponty when he summarized his research for his candidacy to the Collège de France.(56) By this time he already understood "literary language" in a very broad sense such that the notion of "stories" could be applied to the myriad ways human beings try to draw out the significance of their experiences.
From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.(57)
The category of "story" is directly tied to two other major themes, history and truth. Merleau-Ponty states that history and literature are animated by the desire for each of us to give a true account of ourselves, and that
... beneath the petty motives it is this desire which makes the writer want to be read, which makes man sometimes become a writer, and which in any case makes man speak and everyone want to account for himself in the eyes of X - which means that everyone thinks of his life and all lives as something that can in every sense of the word be told as a "story."(58)However, none of the stories we recount are ever constituted once and for all. Singularized by our inherence in the body, and the fact that "perception itself is never complete,"(59) each perspective that offers us "a world" to be expressed is, in turn, continually exceeded as further possibilities of expression make themselves available to us. Each instance of authentic expression completely awakens and recalls "our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen."(60) Hence, as perceiving subjects, we undergo "a continued birth."(61) We continually transcend ourselves through various modes of language. "This transcendence arises the moment I refuse to content myself with the established language, which in effect is a way of silencing me, ... ."(62) As long as language is functioning authentically, literature in general is not an invitation to the listener or reader to discover signification already there but, rather, it disequilibrates and "reorganizes itself to teach the reader - and even the author - what he never knew how to think or say."(63)In direct respect to narrative, or the literary use of language, what this means concretely is that the novelist speaks for his reader a language that deals with the universe of possibilities appropriate to having a human body and human life.(64) The language of the novelist, therefore, is not about reproducing things themselves but searching out and acquiring unfamiliar perspectives; it is meant to transport "us without transitions or preparations from the world of established meanings to something else."(65) In other terms, the writer, who dwells in a world of elaborated signs and in an already speaking world, requires "nothing moreso of us than the power to reorganize our significations according to the indications of the signs which he proposes to us."(66) Reminiscent of Ricoeur's constant reference to Gadamer's "fusion of horizons," Merleau-Ponty writes that the act of prose carries "the speaker and hearer into a common universe by drawing both toward a new signification through their power to designate in excess of their accepted definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us ... ."(67)
Consequently, "the meaning of novel," as a vehicle of accounting for our own lives, acts "as a coherent deformation" on the visible. It is a movement which throws our image of the world out of focus, distends it, and draws it toward fuller meaning.(68) Novels and literature and the labour of language in general "displace our life's center of gravity by suggesting that we cross-check and resume our operations in terms of one another ... ."(69) The reader responds to the author's appeal and joins the writer "at the virtual center of the writing, even if neither one of them is aware of it."(70) The reader, as such, is invited into matrices of ideas(71) that invite us to go beyond are own sedimented notions of self.
Reading is an encounter between the glorious and impalpable incarnation of my own speech and the author's speech. As we have said, reading projects us beyond our own thoughts toward the other person's intention and meaning, just as perception takes us to things themselves across a perspective of which we become aware only after the event. But my power of transcending myself through reading is mine by virtue of my being a speaking subject capable of linguistic gesticulation, just as perception is possible through my body.(72)
The self Merleau-Ponty points toward is a field of experience as well as a field of constructive activity that exists between the sedimented and innovative parameters of language. The self Merleau-Ponty presents is one whose identity surfaces through the work of reading; it is constituted by constant appropriation and re-interpretation of the narrative voices that make up the heritage of literature bequeathed to our individual cultures. The reference to "transcending myself" above should be read in light of Ricoeur's term "refiguration." Each incarnate subject, situated in a world of competing narratives, "is like an open notebook in which we do not know what works it will accomplish but only that" it will "have a history and a meaning" that continually undergoes transformation and "metamorphosis."(73) As we enter into both the historical and fictive texts of our present "world," the hardened understandings of the practical field become open for revision; more importantly, our identities, with reference to these texts, become open for a re-evaluation, and possibly offered new strategies of engagement. In reading, we appropriate the author's horizon that, in turn, becomes an opportunity for a self-description, a redescription that is foremost a rereading of oneself in the world.
Once I have read the book, it acquires a unique and palpable existence quite apart from the words on the pages ... One may even say that, while I am reading the book, it is always with reference to the whole, as I grasp it at any point, that I understand each phrase, each shift in the narrative or delay in the action, to the point where, as the reader, I feel, ... as though I have written the book from the start to finish.(74)
In reading a text, and accepting the emploted significations of the author's world, the reader modifies and absorbs horizons and styles previously unperceived or considered important. The text becomes the opportunity to imagine, in this or that way, different responses to acting and being-in-the-world. Self-understanding in this sense is never a closed circle of immediate knowledge, but the transformative product of self-interpretation, an interpretation that feeds off the many variations found in the stories we find ourselves enmeshed and inherit.
I believe Merleau-Ponty encapsulates much of what has been stated above in an essay published shortly after the Phenomenology of Perception entitled "Reading Montaigne."(75) Here we read of the constant illusion that surrounds any attempt to detail a totally transparent and substantive sense of selfhood. In commenting on Montaigne's theme that all truth contradicts itself, Merleau-Ponty states that "self-understanding for Montaigne" is a "dialogue with self." This dialogue, however, is "like 'essaying' or 'experimenting on' himself" in an attempt to evoke a response from the conscious but opaque being that he is.(76) In the end, the question of the self is never answered; there can only be a question of describing the self as problematic. The search for a indecomposable cogito becomes an inquiry without discovery, a hunt without a kill since "'the world is only a school for inquisitioners.'"(77) It is as if the only victory over the self lay in continually expressing the self as Montaigne himself did so copiously. As Merleau-Ponty reflects, "in this ambiguous self (le soi ambigu) - which is offered to everything, and which he never finished exploring - the place of all obscurities, the mystery of all mysteries, and something like an ultimate truth."(78)
The "ambiguous self" here should not be understood as a troubled character or lost soul of sorts. In context to Merleau-Ponty's remarks above, the connotation is quite different. The "ambiguous self" is one that is distilled from the labour of living, our ability to use language and construct plots and the work of reading. It conforms to a model of a dynamic identity arising from the projection of a life lived, recounted, and recognized in the stories one tells about themselves in so many different literary modes and genres. The "ambiguous self" is never finished exploring because as Merleau-Ponty alluded to so many times above, our lives are like stories, and, as Ricoeur would add, our life is a story in search of a narrator.(79) Each text, each philosophy, each literary product becomes a potential horizon or world that I can enter into and, in turn, transforms my perception, my outlook, my sense of being-in-the-world. Henceforth, the self that travels through such and such a horizon now recounts a life lived differently, attaching and elaborating certain significations and meanings previously undetected and perceived, and foreseeing patterns of behaviour never before entertained.
To conclude: "the ambiguous self" and "narrative identity" are notions of self-understanding that escape the "pseudo-alternatives" of either pure change or absolute identity. Ricoeur's narrative identity, and Merleau-Ponty's approximation of it, as I have argued for it, are attempts at avoiding the reductionism of a Cartesian cogito or its complete dispersion. Both suggestions replace, at the core of human existence, a self-contained understanding with an identity that makes and unmakes itself over the cohesion of a life time - a life time that will invite our identities to undergo many a "coherent deformation" and "reconfiguration" because there is no one algorithm or calculus to identity; rather, our "personal life, expression, understanding, and history advance obliquely and not in straight lines towards ends and concepts."(80)
NOTES
1. See Gary B. Madison, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 57-81.
2. See M. C. Dillon, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ed. M.C. Dillon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), ix-xxxv.
3. Hugh J. Silverman, "Between Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism," Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), 146.
4. Joseph Margolis, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism," Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, 241-256.
5. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, Vol. 2 (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985); Time and Narrative, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Vol. 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
6. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
7. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 114, n.1.
8. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 331, n.1.
10. Paul Ricoeur, "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics," From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. K. Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 40.
11. See Shaun Gallagher, "Introduction: The Hermeneutics of Ambiguity," in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, 3-12.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1994), 427.
17. The reader is reminded that in the first section of the third volume of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur makes a striking contrast, through the works of Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger between cosmic time and phenomenological time under the title "The Aporetics of Temporality." The key aporia is the fact that a phenomenological conception of time always borrows from cosmic time whereas cosmic time borrows nothing from phenomenological time.
18. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 180-192.
20. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 18.
21. Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Identity," Philosophy Today 35(1991): 73-81, 77-78.
22. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 143. Elsewhere, Ricoeur states: "The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told" (ibid., 147-148).
23. In a more general sense, Ricoeur states that: "The self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates' phrase in the Apology. And an examined life is, in large part, one purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of the narratives, by they historical or fictional, conveyed by our culture. So self-constancy refers to a self instructed by the works of a culture that it has applied to itself;" see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 247.
24. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 169.
27. However, this refiguration is open to "action only through a decision whereby a person says: Here I stand! So narrative identity is not equivalent to true self-constancy except through this decisive moment, which makes ethical responsibility the highest factor in self-constancy" (ibid., Vol. 3, 249). It is this very theme that becomes the topic of Ricoeur's Oneself as Another.
28. Paul Ricoeur, "Intellectual Autobiography," The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 47. Elsewhere, Ricoeur states that: "What the narrative interpretation properly provides is precisely 'the figure-able' character of the individual which has for its result, that the self, narratively interpreted, is itself a refigured self - a self which figures itself as this or that." See Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Identity," 80. Also, see Ricoeur's comments in, "World of the Text, World of the Reader," A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 494.
29. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. E. Ballard and L. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 210.
30. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 303. For a current re-evaluation, by Ricoeur, of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project, see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 2: La contrée des philosophes (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1992).
31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 137-139.
32. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 18.
36. Ibid., 109; this topic was first approached in Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 230 and appears later in "Initiative," From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 208-226.
37. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 111.
38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 438.
39. Paul Ricoeur, "Initiative," 214-217.
40. See Shaun Gallagher, "Introduction: The Hermeneutics of Ambiguity," 3.
41. It is interesting to note that it was once suggested to Merleau-Ponty that his philosophical writing style reads more like a novel than a discursive analysis. See Merleau-Ponty's discussion with M. Bréhier in "The Primacy of Perception," in The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 30.
42. Following the designations made by M. C. Dillon, in Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 254, n.1, I am interested in Merleau-Ponty's scholarly research from 1945 to 1958 which includes the Phenomenology of Perception and a wide assortment of essays on various topics.
43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 404. In the first chapter of the last section of the Phenomenology of Perception, entitled "The Cogito," Merleau-Ponty makes an important distinction between a verbal cogito (un Cogito sur parole) and the tacit cogito. He states that the verbal cogito does not put me into "contact with my own life and thought" unless the tacit cogito is encountered (402). However, Merleau-Ponty throughout his thesis, equivocates on this coincidence with the tacit cogito. To take only one example, in one place he speaks about "absolute contact with myself"(295), while in another he says that "nowhere do I enjoy absolute possession of myself" (240). Merleau-Ponty will criticize himself later on these inconsistencies: see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 175-176.
52. Ibid., 337. Elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty states: "Contact with ourselves is necessarily achieved only in the sphere of ambiguity" (ibid., 381).
56. This is evident in Merleau-Ponty's summary of his own scholarly projects (1947) as found in "An Unpublished Text," The Primacy of Perception, 3-11; see especially page 8.
57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 28. My emphasis.
58. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," Signs, trans. Richard C. McLeary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 74-75. My emphasis.
61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "An Unpublished Text," 6.
62. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Science and the Experience of Expression," The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 20.
64. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," 76.
72. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Science and the Experience of Expression," 14.
73. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "An Unpublished Text," 6-7.
75. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Reading Montaigne," Signs, 198-210.
79. See Ricoeur's essay, "Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator," Facts and Values, ed. and trans. M. C. Doeser and J. N. Kraay Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, Vol. 10 (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), 121-132.
80. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," 83.