Phénoménologie de la PerceptionMaurice Merleau-Ponty

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Sean Dorrance Kelly

Department of Philosophy, 1879 HallPrinceton, NJ 08544-1006

(609) 258-4291 / fax (609) 258-1502skelly@princeton.edu

ProposalMaurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) may well prove to have been the most important French philosopher of the twentieth century. In 2008 we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. Given Merleau-Ponty’s central position in the French philosophy of the last century, and his increasing importance to contemporary work in Anglo-American philosophy, I propose to honor his centenary by publishing a new English translation of Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, Phénoménologie de la Perception.

Even today Merleau-Ponty is probably not the most well-known French philosopher of the twentieth century. In the English speaking world figures such as Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, and even Bergson probably enjoy greater name recognition. And yet it is Merleau-Ponty’s work, and not that of his more well-known contemporaries, that is beginning to have a real influence in Anglo-American philosophy. It is read and taken extremely seriously by philosophers of mind, philosophers of perception, and philosophers of art, not to mention by cognitive neuroscientists and art historians, among others. And it is read not merely for its historical interest but for the contribution it can make to philosophical issues of contemporary concern. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty’s detailed discussion of classical empirical work in psychology enlivens rather than trivializes the philosophical import of his analyses. In short, Merleau-Ponty’s importance to and influence among contemporary philosophers cannot be overestimated. And out of the broad array of his work there is no doubt that Phénoménologie de la Perception is the canonical text.

The original French edition of PP was published in 1945; the only English translation, by Colin Smith, was published in 1962. Though the Smith translation has served two generations of readers well, it is no longer sufficient to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of Merleau-Ponty scholarship. To begin with, Smith himself was a novelist, not a philosopher. His translation, as a result, is not always sufficiently sensitive to the philosophical impact of various translation choices. Indeed, there are a number of places in which Smith’s philosophical naïveté leads him to make mistakes in translation that affect the philosophical sense of a passage. Moreover, a

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number of disastrous mistakes seem to have been introduced into the most recent edition of the translation by means of some kind of mechanical error. For example, the important Husserlian word “protention” has been systematically replaced with the word “protection.” I should emphasize that these latter mistakes are not attributable to Smith himself; but they do nevertheless have a devastating effect on the current edition of his translation.

Beyond the issue of the sense of the passages, the Smith edition is almost completely lacking the scholarly apparatus that is now expected by serious readers of philosophical texts. There is no indication in the English text, for example, of the French pagination; as a result, readers of the translation who want to locate a passage in the original must spend inordinate amounts of time searching from page to page. For readers not already familiar with the French original, this can be a very time-consuming and wasteful process. It is made worse by Merleau-Ponty’s exceedingly sparse use of the paragraph break. It is not uncommon for a paragraph to go on for five or six pages in the French, giving the reader no breath for air. I propose to introduce, as Kemp-Smith did in his translation of Kant’s First Critique, a paragraphing system that will bring the text under control. Also, the extended table of contents that appears in the French is completely lacking from the current translation. By including this – and perhaps even by putting the chapter sub-headings in the body of the text, as has been done in a recent Swiss German translation of PP – I will give the reader more scaffolding on which to build his understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s often dense and sometimes confusing arguments.

In addition to these more prosaic aids, I propose to offer an extended critical apparatus for the translation as well. Smith’s translation contains no critical apparatus at all. One good model in this respect is the Macquarrie and Robinson English translation of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. These translators are careful to highlight important words in the original German text and to discuss the nuances of meaning that distinguish them from the English words they have used in translation. This is certainly one of my goals as well. I also plan to update references to and discussion of relevant empirical literature. One of the reasons Merleau-Ponty’s work is so relevant to contemporary philosophers and scientists is that it is grounded in extended discussion of famous neuropsychological cases of the day. In the intervening 60 years, however, many advances have been made in the scientific study of these kinds of cases, and I will offer some guide to and discussion of the more recent literature that is relevant to the phenomenological claims Merleau-Ponty is making. Finally, I will write a substantive introduction to the translation, giving an overview of Merleau-Ponty’s place in the history of phenomenology, the central aspects of his views on perception, action, and language, and his relevance for contemporary philosophical and cognitive neuroscientific work. I should mention that I intend the entire critical apparatus to serve as the beginning of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s work that I will continue in a more extended commentary on the text. The commentary will be published separately and at a later time.

Likely ReadershipThe current English translation is read, despite its defects, by a wide range of people. By improving the organizational structure, and offering a critical apparatus that will help readers to understand the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s work to contemporary issues in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, I expect the current readership to expand. It will include:

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• Philosophy undergraduates and graduate students studying phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of the body.

• Cognitive science undergraduates and graduate students.• Academic philosophers studying perception, action, intentionality, consciousness,

embodiment.• Roboticists and artificial intelligence researchers.• Cognitive neuroscientists studying perception, action, and visuo-motor activity.• General readers with an interest in phenomenology.

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