Merleau-Ponty on Beauvoir's Literary-Philosophical Method
ABSTRACT: Modern philosophy from the mid-nineteenth century on, has been particularly interested in choosing, adapting, and in some cases inventing literary forms to fit the particular philosophical subject under investigation. Simone de Beauvoir, with her explicit rejection of any formalist division between literature and philosophy, is one of the most interesting contributors to the modern development of philosophical writing. The waters surrounding de Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophical method are somewhat muddled because the literary forms she used innovatively for philosophy — the novel and the short story — have (unlike, for example, the literary forms of Wittgenstein) resulted in writing which has been chiefly esteemed largely in terms of literature. In fact, many of her compositions rest simultaneously in both the categories of literature and philosophy. The significance of this aspect of her work was recognized by some of her contemporary philosophical associates, most particularly Merleau-Ponty. This paper draws on Merleau-Ponty to explore the philosophical ideas which inspired de Beauvoir’s methodology, and considers the nature and ramifications of her originality in terms of philosophy’s tradition of methodological diversity.
1. Philosophy's Literary Forms
In this paper we want to examine a category error in which her fiction and philosophy are treated as mutually exclusive and separate categories. The underlying problem at work in contributing to this mistake is that of the conflation of a writerly form with the type of subject matter addressed by it. Falling into this confusion is particularly misleading for readers of Simone de Beauvoir because one of the most significant and fascinating aspects of her methodology lies in her explicit rejection of any formalist division between literature and philosophy. This is an intriguing aspect of her work which places it in an honourable and innovative philosophical position. It is not often enough noted that one part of the Western philosophical tradition — a part which is especially admirable — is the diversity of writerly forms which have proved useful to its major practitioners. The dialogues of Plato and Hume, the fables of the Enlightenment philosophers, the dramatic narratives of Kierkegaard, the parables and aphorisms of Nietzsche, as well as the essays of Kant and Sartre are all part of that heritage. Equally, the mathematician's "paper" used by Tarski and Russell, and the scientific paper adapted and made so fashionable by the logical positivists, and that strange literary form devised by Wittgenstein, so eccentric that it apparently remains without a name and yet has its antecedent in Spinoza's Ethics, all form part of the major lineage of ways in which philosophy has been successfully written.
In the field of philosophy there can be numerous answers to a general question, depending on a particular philosopher's views on the subject. Often times an answer is left undetermined. In the broad sense of the word and also stated in the dictionary philosophy can be described as the pursuit of human knowledge and human values. There are many different people with many different theories of knowledge. Two of these people, also philosophers, in which this paper will go into depth about are Descartes and Plato. Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Plato's The Republic are the topics that are going to be discussed in this paper.
Descartes, R., & Cottingham, J. (1986). Meditation on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deep-seated in these practices is added universal investigative and enquiring of acquainted conflicts between philosophy and the art of speaking and/or effective writing. Most often we see the figurative and rhetorical elements of a text as purely complementary and marginal to the basic reasoning of its debate, closer exploration often exposes that metaphor and rhetoric play an important role in the readers understanding of a piece of literary art. Usually the figural and metaphorical foundations strongly back or it can destabilize the reasoning of the texts. Deconstruction however does not indicate that all works are meaningless, but rather that they are spilling over with numerous and sometimes contradictory meanings. Derrida, having his roots in philosophy brings up the question, “what is the meaning of the meaning?”
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Development. by Fred Halliday; The Rise and Fall of the Shah. by Amin Saikal; Iran:
The “hermeneutic activity –the practice of close reading” (373) is what Love evaluates next. The practice of close reading became the framework of hermeneutics in the early 20th century and has been the foundation of text evaluation since then, no matter what different literary approaches and cultural changes were present, since “the richness of texts continues to serve as a carrier for an allegedly superannuated humanism”(373). Her own assertion regarding the interpretation of texts can be interpreted in sev...
The notion of the author has often been disputed when it comes to critical literary studies. The argument centers around one basic question: Should the author be considered when looking at a text? There are numerous reasons given as to why the author is important or why the ...
To some, truth is something that is absolute and unchanging. To others, truth is volatile and inconstant. In the 16th and 17th century, the foundations of civilization itself had been shaken. Many of the ideas which were thought to be absolutely true had been plunged into the depths of uncertainty. The cosmological, geographical, and religious revolutions called into question the nature of truth itself. It is no wonder, then, that some of the great writers at the time included within their works a treatise on the ways in which truth is constructed. Because of the major ideological revolutions that shaped their world, Milton, Montaigne, and Shakespeare all used characters and theatrical devices to create their own ideas on the construction of truth.
Rene Descartes decision to shatter the molds of traditional thinking is still talked about today. He is regarded as an influential abstract thinker; and some of his main ideas are still talked about by philosophers all over the world. While he wrote the "Meditations", he secluded himself from the outside world for a length of time, basically tore up his conventional thinking; and tried to come to some conclusion as to what was actually true and existing. In order to show that the sciences rest on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in the mind and not the senses, Descartes must begin by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to him by the senses. This is done in the first of six different steps that he named "Meditations" because of the state of mind he was in while he was contemplating all these different ideas. His six meditations are "One:Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", "Two:Concerning the Nature of the Human mind: that it is better known than the Body", "Three: Concerning God, that he exists", "Four: Concerning the True and the False", "Five: Concerning the Essence of Material things, and again concerning God, that he exists" and finally "Six: Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the real distinction between Mind and Body". Although all of these meditations are relevant and necessary to understand the complete work as a whole, the focus of this paper will be the first meditation.
Just as the authors’ Judeo-Christian God created man in his own image, Proust and Descartes fashion their creator-narrators as themselves—Marcel, as Proust, a writer in search of complete description (the expression of complete feeling); the Meditator, as Descrates, a thinker in search of complete knowledge. The authors are the self-referential sources of their narrators’ (and of their own) quests for truth. In this way, from their ideas of truth and of themselves, both Proust and Descartes, indeed, conceive their own
Moore, Brooke Noel., and Kenneth Bruder. "Chapter 6- The Rise of Metaphysics and Epistemology; Chapter 9- The Pragmatic and Analytic Traditions; Chapter 7- The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Philosophy: the Power of Ideas. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Print.
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