The Reduction

The Reduction July 28, 2005

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) provides this helpful summary of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of phenomenological reduction:

“The transformation of the object of perception into the thought of the object of perception, that is to say, the attempt to reconstitute the world in immanence, is pursued not only by analytic reflection; it is also accomplished by the phenomenological reduction, at least as it is proposed by Husserl in Volume One of the Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology (Kluwer Publishers, The Netherlands, 1982) The reduction puts into brackets the thesis of the ‘natural attitude,’ that is, the naive belief in the independent existence of a natural world, and, implicitly, that our perception of the world is caused by the world. After ‘the reduction’ the world remains, but now it is a world that is meant, a world which is the intentional correlate of acts of Sinngebung of a subject for whom this world appears. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘The phenomenological reduction is idealist’ (PP, xi). He rejects those aspects of Husserl’s thought


which make the being of the subject coincide with its consciousness of itself, and which transform the experience of the world into the thought of the world. Nevertheless, he wishes to retain a certain attenuated, or weaker, conception of the reduction; he evokes Eugen Fink’s characterization of the reduction as ‘wonder in the face of the world’. Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘Reduction does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis: it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world, and thus brings them to our notice. It, alone, is consciousness of the world, because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical’ (PP, xii). The reduction, as Merleau-Ponty conceives of it, disrupts our absorption in the world, thereby destroying its ‘ordinary character.’ The Russian formalists claimed that the function of poetic language is to ‘defamiliarize’ language. It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty wishes to retain a version of Husserls’s notion of ‘reduction’. Writing on painting in the last published article in his lifetime, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964 ) Merleau-Ponty employs this conception of the reduction. He tells us that ‘the vision of the painter’ shows us what ‘profane vision’ overlooks (literally) in its rush to posit objects. The painter’s vision draws our attention to the play of light and shadow through which the visible object becomes visible. For Merleau-Ponty, it is often the work of artists that performs something analogous to his notion of the reduction. In The Visible and the Invisible, it is the writing of Proust in Remembrance of Things Past that breaks through the familiarity of ordinary language, showing us the ‘little phrases’ which form the substrate of ordinary speech.”

In this sense phenomenology is a return to the ancient philosophical insight that philosophy arises from wonder, from worship. For Marion, it this reduction is accomplished only by recognizing the givenness of the given in the “fold” of the given. That is, the wonder that motivates philosophy does not arise from the object-ness of the phenomena (Husserl) or the being-ness of the phenomena (Heidegger) but from the givenness of the phenomena.


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