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HORIZON з (i) 2014 : 4. Book Reviews : Prepared by lu. Apostolescu : p. 258-259
ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ • STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE • STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY • ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES
IV. РЕЦЕНЗИИ
WELSH TALIA. «THE CHILD AS NATURAL PHENOMENOLOGIST:
PRIMAL AND PRIMARY EXPERIENCE IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S PSYCHOLOGY» Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2013, 194 P.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2880-4
This book is an informative, valuable and thought-provoking contribution to the Mer-leau-Ponty’s interdisciplinary work on child psychology. Scholarly and comprehensive, it acknowledges the difficulty of accesing the world of the child but encourages us to interact with the challenges of this field and to resist objectifying the childhood experience.
As Talia Welsh points out in the Preface, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological and psychological achievements are difficult to summarize given that he stands at the intersection of two traditions: phenomenology and postmodernism. One can portray Merleau-Ponty as the inheritor of Edmund Husserl’s legacy. If we focus on his magnum opus, the «Phenomenology of Perception» (1945), we can distinguish an unique and fruitful research into the nature of unreflective perceptual experience, precisely in the manner of its appearing. Another branch of interpretation views Merleau-Ponty as the forefather of postmodernism, elucidating his posthumous and unfinished masterpiece «The Visible and the Invisible» (published in 1964), at the center. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, his disintegration of the limits between mind and body, as well as between embodied agents and world-horizon, clearly places him beyond the specifics of classical Husserlian phenomenology.
In the first chapter, Early Work in Child Psychology, we find that the child’s behaviour indicates a structured, meaningful experience as our primary and primal connection to the world and others. Altough Merleau-Ponty makes significant modifications upon this initial rough outline of the child’s existence, his subsequent research remains largely sympathetic to the initial forays into the philosophy (Hegel, Bergson) and psychology of early life (Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, Adhémar Gelb, Kurt Goldstein).
Chapter 2, Phenomenology, Gestalt Theory, and Psychonanalysis, discusses the relationship between philosophy and psychology in the Sorbonne Lectures. Welsh insists that Merleau-Ponty argues for the relevance of phenomenological insights to experimental
© Iulian Apostolescu, 2014
praxis and also the relevance of psychological and anthropological studies for a phenomenology of lived experience. In doing so, the french philosopher does not see in principle why phenomenology and psychology could not be parallel in all respects even if much of psychology is dominated by an unreflective scientism.
In the chapter 3, Syncretic Sociability and the Birth of the Self, the author calls attention to Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that our earliest life is social and responsive, but not subjective. Instead of viewing this as an evidence of a proto-self and other-awareness, Merleau-Ponty elucidates the concept of a syncretic, transitive experience. Our early life is defined by a continuum with life rather than by an innate sense of selfhood and otherness. Syncretic sociability is seen as a phase where the infant, due to an inability to organize her perceptual and tactile world, confuses herself with others. She has no subjectivity and hence no intersubjectivity. It’s important to emphasize here that, according to Merleau-Ponty, this anonymous, asubjective life is social in that it is directed toward others. In other words, human intersubjectivity does not rely upon discrete subjectivities.
Chapter 4, Contemporary Research in Psychology and Phenomenology, asks if it is necessary to criticise Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions about our early experience given contemporary research in neonatal imitation (Andrew Meltzhoff, M. K. Moore), theory of mind (Alison Go-pnik, Susan Jones, Olga Maratos), interaction theory (Shaun Gallagher) and dialogical phenomenology (Beata Stawarska). In light of what is at stake in contemporary debates in early infant experience, Welsh asserts that Merleau-Ponty would have certainly had to revise his statements about the life of the infant. He would have likely taken up a similary path to Sta-warska and Gallagher in searching for a truly interdisciplinary approach to intersubjectivity.
Chapter 5, Exploration and Learning, underscores two examples of the child’s perception and understanding of the world: drawing and explanations of magic tricks. Following these examples, we can see that children are naturally engaged with experience and will provide childlike explanations for surprising phenomena if they are allowed to express themselves freely. Merleau-Ponty contradicts Jean Piaget’s suggestion that children are natural metaphysicians by portraying children more as natural phenomenologists. Children explore the life-world rather than analyze the world. The child’s reality has a solidity that while not static, can appear to be rigid to adults who are indoctrinated in certain philosophical and scientific generalizations.
Chapter 6, Culture, Development, and Gender, focuses on how Merleau-Ponty incorporates the influence of sociocultural norms and the path of physical development in his theory. Strongly influenced by existentialist, Marxist, and Freudian theory, Merleau-Ponty agrees not only that we are culturally determined to privilege certain values over others, but also that our very methods of grasping the truth are influenced by our factical situation.
Finally, for reasons of space, it is not possible here to emphasize a critical examination of Welsh’s main phenomenological theses about Merleau-Ponty’s project. Nevertheless, suffice it to say that this present volume deserves to be welcomed and studied carefully by students and scholars in embodiment theory, Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and by anyone interested in the philosophical relevance of early childhood for the constitution of an individual’s subjectivity.
Iulian Apostolescu
