Rajiv Kaushik

If the greatest lesson of phenomenology is that it remains incomplete and open, then its place in relation to our natural theorizing needs reconsideration. This means situating phenomenology and other “non-phenomenological” fields side by side. Merleau-Ponty says, for example, that phenomenology and the sciences are related concentrically rather than hierarchically. In view of his concentrical attitude, I reconsider the relation between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and nature. I also reconsider some of the remarks Merleau-Ponty makes in the Preface about the difference between phenomenology and psychology. I finally consider and problematize a remark, made by Bréhier during the discussion period, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is better served by art and literature and even “results in a novel.”

In a Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty uses the fine phraseology of an “architectonic past” and a “mythical time” to describe Proust’s remembrances of things past. This paper first considers how this architectonic past sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and second how this results in a mythical time, which is an originary encounter with this past. Paying also attention to Merleau-Ponty’s final, completed reflections on “Swann’s Way,” Volume One of Remembrances of Things Past, I suggest that by exposing the inner-connection between the two senses of time, Proust is highly significant for Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of “reversibility”. Proustian remembrances are used by Merleau-Ponty not to expose an inwardness, but something that is withdrawn and behind the sensible. The way in which these remembrances operate in myth time bespeaks of a memorial dimension of the past of being itself.