The Imaginary as Introduction to Ontology and then as Fundamental Ontological Model

The project of developing a new ontology is clearly invoked for the first time in the 1954–55 course on passivity which lays out a long plea “for an ontology of the perceived world.” To be fair, Merleau-Ponty’s thought always had an ontological horizon and Phenomenology of Perception is much more than a simple psychological investigation of the lived perceptual experience of particular living beings. In The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Levinas highlighted the ontological dimension of the phenomenological undertaking, and as early as Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty takes up the thesis that phenomenology overcomes dogmatism and skepticism by “defining being as what appears to us.” Merleau-Ponty goes even further by situating himself within the terms of the radical Husserlian critique of positivism: accordingly, nothing, strictly speaking, can be, everything “is temporalized.” Merleau-Ponty is firm about this. For him, there is no question that his thinking must be understood in the wider general framework of a radical overhaul of ontology. However, as Saint Aubert emphasizes, it is precisely on this point that he was criticized during the discussion that followed his 1946 lecture, “The Primacy of Perception.” His study of perception was received by many of the participants as being confined to the narrow field of the perceived at the expense of the higher registers of thought and being. The universal scope of these analyses (“all consciousness is perceptual consciousness”) was therefore overlooked. During these same discussions, it seems that, for his part, Jean Beaufret grasped the ontological dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but he criticized him for not going far enough: “the phenomenological descriptions that [Merleau-Ponty] offers us […] maintain the vocabulary of idealism. In this they are in line with Husserlian descriptions.” In addition, the idea of a mixture of Being and Nothingness, which is suggested in Phenomenology of Perception but left undeveloped, and this at a time when the debate with Sartre had scarcely begun, also deserves to be broadly clarified, which is to say, formulated beyond a dualism that remains positivist.