Essays

Peter MacAulay
Dr. Dryden
PHIL 3351
April 13, 2025

Piecewise Wholes Aren’t Enough

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty creates a tightly structured account of human experience that resists traditional dualisms. In his chapter on freedom, he builds a position not by balancing existentialism and determinism but by critiquing both and going down a new avenue. For Merleau-Ponty, human action is neither absolutely free nor completely determined; instead, it emerges from the embodied subject’s ongoing engagement with the world. His position is compelling and solid; it is rooted in the lived body and the sedimented history of perception, which relates to most people's general experience. However, it is precisely the strength and completeness of Merleau-Ponty’s position that makes me feel unsatisfied. In an effort to resolve oppositions and clarify the structure of experience, it risks undermining the ambiguity it claims to respect. Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon are influenced by phenomenology but resist this kind of closure. Merleau-Ponty offers a stable structure, to which they allow for rupture, opacity, and breakdown while respecting ambiguity. These elements are crucial for understanding the true world. In this paper, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of freedom, while rich and insightful, is ultimately limiting to our understanding of human experience. By comparing his work with Beauvoir and Fanon, I will show how a view more accepting of ambiguity may be better suited to describe the complexity of real life.

Merleau-Ponty begins his account of freedom by discussing total freedom or none at all. In this section, he discusses how “It is unconceivable that I am free in some of my actions while determined in others, for what exactly would this idle freedom be that grants free play to determinisms?” (Merleau-Ponty 459). By this, he is describing that for absolute freedom to work, there needs to be no doubt that determinism is not playing any role in life. Absolute freedom is negated when you suggest that any part of life could be determined. If anything is determined, then you do not have absolute freedom. He describes this by saying, “…there are only two possibilities: either they have the force to make me act, in which case there is no freedom, or they do not have this force, in which case my freedom is total…” (Merleau-Ponty 459). Therefore, our actions must be entirely our own or not at all. Thus, Merleau-Ponty suggests that things like being Jewish, hunchbacked, or handsome are aspects about the individual that are predetermined and go beyond their choice; how are we free? There is also the divide between the scientific understanding of causality and our affirmation of absolute freedom. While you can say that you’re not handsome and are in fact ugly, that doesn’t change how the rest of the world may see you. While you may have the freedom to believe scientific understanding of causality is wrong, there are universally agreed upon aspects of the world you cannot control. Take Newton’s laws for example.

Given the potential problems with absolute freedom, he questions, “Then there is no such thing as action, choice, or “doing”.” (Merleau-Ponty 461). In this next section, Merleau-Ponty discusses a deterministic view of the world. Since the actions of the individual cannot be entirely their own, freedom could be rendered impossible, and we must consider if this is possible or how it could work. An interesting example of why a deterministic world view might be the case is because, “…if the slave displays as much freedom by living in fear as he does in breaking his chains, then it cannot be said that there is such a thing as free action.” (Merleau-Ponty 461). Here, Merleau-Ponty is displaying that the slave’s actions brought on by living in fear are no freer than the actions of breaking the chain that held them. This is because what caused the slave to break the chains was the oppression of being a slave. The slave does not choose to break free purely on their volition, if they were not oppressed, then there would be no need to break free. It’s situations like these that counteract a decision changing the future, for it was bound to happen based on the past. The slave is not changing the future by breaking their chains, only responding to the oppression. Merleau-Ponty states that “The very notion of freedom requires that our decision plunge into the future, that something has been done by it…” (Merleau-Ponty 462). Therefore, in the deterministic view, where every decision is presupposed by a cause, there is no freedom.

Yet Merleau-Ponty does not believe we live in a deterministic world. To find out why, we first must determine if there is sense in the world. A common pitfall is thinking that you, the individual is the sinngebung [sense giver], but this can easily fall into idealism or solipsism. Merleau-Ponty has already determined that both of those world views are not likely or impossible. This leads him to ask, “Who gives the motives a sense.” (Merleau-Ponty 464). The answer he gives is simply context. The size of a mountain will only appear large in comparison to your body when you are at it’s base, while it appears miniscule when viewed far enough away (Merleau-Ponty 464). Therefore, sense is given to the world by the context around it. No one individual, deity, object, etc, gives the world sense, but instead, it is how the world interacts with everything in it that contextually gives sense and meaning. Yet, despite everything in the world giving context, we still wonder how we can all almost unanimously perceive similar things. We’ve determined that idealism and solipsism are not viable, and this further proves it. How could we all or any individual be the sinngebung when everything appears the same or similar to everyone? In idealism, if the individual is the controller of their perception, then there would be more inconsistencies between people. In solipsism, we would never be surprised by the world. Therefore, the world and the individuals in it must all be giving context to each other.

Merleau-Ponty then brings in his theory of sedimentation. He believes that the world is built up upon itself through continued interaction with its interconnected parts. Like a river being shaped over years from water eroding the edges to form the curves, sequentially, the eroded sediment fills in other spots. Merleau-Ponty believes that we, as humans, shape the world around us. While the world was not created by us, just about every aspect has been touched and shaped, even ever so slightly, by us.

Merleau-Ponty has shown that neither absolute freedom nor determinism, or anything in between, will accurately portray life. Instead, he believes that through our interaction with the world, we shape it, and it shapes us, but we as individuals choose how we interact with the world. That is not to say we have complete freedom; the world that we interact with shapes us and causes us to interact in ways influenced by sedimentation, although there is still freedom. By choosing this position, Merleau-Ponty feels that he is accurately depicting life and not falling into the pitfall of dualism between the two extremes. The position depicts a mosaic of gears meshing into each other, subtly shaving off parts with too little tolerance, and those shavings are collected and used in solidifying the mosaic.

Merleau-Ponty does a good job at painting a picture of reality that most people can look at and think that he has captured the view of how our freedom works in a material world with unique minds. Despite this, I’m unsatisfied. I cannot help but feel that Merleau-Ponty has brought us a beautiful, all-encompassing tapestry of life that you have no choice but to bow down to. It’s impressive; it solves a lot of problems that people have had with the world for a long time, but to me, it doesn’t capture life, experience, and meaning. It paints a picture of how everything works together, but not only does it fail to account for everyone, but it is negating the ambiguity of the world. Even if Merleau-Ponty’s account of freedom is accepting of potential ambiguity, the notion of his theory accounting for all scenarios suggests that there is no ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the world is ambiguous in his refutation of idealism and solipsism such that we as the individual cannot know all. “A consistent transcendental idealism strips the world of its opacity and its transcendence.” (Merleau-Ponty LXXV). A trivial case of this is not knowing the colour of the back of a chair because you haven’t perceived it yet. What is the human experience if the world, and particularly freedom, is not ambiguous? Does that suggest that there is potential for a greater purpose? An absolute way to live? If you cannot fit into Merleau-Ponty’s handcrafted mosaic, are you not supposed to be here? All these questions arise when you try to pin down the world into a model of itself. Sure, models are helpful. They help us see patterns and connections that are hard to see up close in the weeds. But models are not true to life. Models exclude and simplify. To suggest that we could find the limits of freedom is to suggest an unambiguous world. Just as any scientific theory cannot fully capture the world, neither can a phenomenological one. What sets some other theories apart from a Merleau-Ponty-like theory is that they see the experience of being a human, and they only show how the world reflects this, but they do not suggest that the world or freedom is holistically any which way. This is not to say that absolute freedom is the way, as Merleau-Ponty showed that it isn’t always the case. Instead, I’m only suggesting that the way Merleau-Ponty is presenting his position sets him up to pin freedom down, rejecting others’ experiences and ambiguity.

To point out what I’m saying here, I’d like to go over how Beauvoir presents not only a different experience and perception of freedom from Merleau-Ponty, but she also doesn’t fall into pinning freedom down. Beauvoir acknowledges the ambiguity of the world, and instead of treating it like a problem to solve as Merleau-Ponty does, she treats it as a fundamental part of ethically living. “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.” (Beauvoir 24). Beauvoir never tries to structure and solve the ambiguous world. She shows how you must truly accept the ambiguity. Once you realize that it is the only thing you can truly know, you can begin to learn how to live ethically. Only then can we take responsibility for our freedom. “Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.” (Beauvoir 24). You need to take responsibility for your freedom, and only then will you be free. Taking responsibility in an ambiguous world is when meaning is born. This is a wildly different account than Merleau- Ponty's. I find this account satisfying not because Beauvoir’s theory is less provable or something along those lines but because it accepts our condition. Beauvoir is not making assumptions she can’t be sure of, and still, it appears to mirror life as Merleau-Ponty’s did. The difference is that Beauvoir’s mirroring of life isn’t about making it all fit. This is why Beauvoir’s account feels like a mirror, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s feels like a zoomed-out tapestry or a crowded family tree. Just as the mountains appear small from Sirius, the lives of humans do in an all-encompassing tapestry. In Beauvoir’s worldview, Merleau-Ponty can still be useful and provide valuable insight, but it doesn’t account for everything as it tries to do, and in doing that, it attempts to do what cannot be done. Knowing everything cannot be done. Frantz Fanon furthers this point by showing that sedimentation does not occur as Merleau-Ponty suggests. Instead of slow, subtle sedimentation, Fanon describes a hostile, violent sedimentation. The harmonious vision that Merleau-Ponty describes, envisioning sedimentation as a give-and-take situation, is simply not true for Fanon. “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema.” (Fanon 90). Colonialization, racism, and generally the views of others upon the self disproportionately sediment the individual. Their freedom is still their own, but the sediment of the world is impacting that freedom. If sedimentation shapes your freedom, then how could someone like Fanon ever live their life? In Merleau-Ponty’s version of freedom, Fanon must always try to wear a white mask to hide his black skin. Fanon shows how being rational, irrational, isolated, and integrated in society can’t make a dent in the mountain of sediment that suppresses his freedom. Despite this, Fanon is not trapped under the mountain. After a horrifying experience on the bus, Fanon is ripped from his body-schema, his self was in thirds. When his body-schema was returned to him, “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day.” (Fanon 93). The repair he is constantly having to do to his body schema is exhausting and can inhibit freedom, but Fanon still has freedom. How could Fanon still have freedom in Merleau-Ponty’s view? Surely, the mountain of sediment would have been too much, yet Fanon is not stuck. “I embrace the world! I am the world!” (Fanon 107). Fanon has taken responsibility for realizing his self, giving him freedom from oppressive structures. Yes, the sediment is debilitating, but he is still able to see the ambiguity of the world, allowing him to be free despite others' perspectives.

Merleu-Ponty says “we are condemned to sense , and there is nothing we can do or say that does not acquire a name in history.” (Merleau-Ponty LXXXiV). This further suggests that he does acknowledge some ambiguity in freedom but ultimately looks for meaning where it isn’t. Meaning is not gained through history. History provides a useful context to us as humans, but it doesn’t state anything about the world except what happened. There are names for things in history, but names, while useful, aren’t meaningful. Meaning, as Beauvoir suggests, comes from living in and understanding ambiguity. “if freedom were a thing or a quality naturally attached to a thing. Then, in effect, one would either have it or not have it. But the fact is that it merges with the very movement of this ambiguous reality which is called existence and which is only by making itself be; to such an extent that it is precisely only by having to be conquered that it gives itself.” (Beauvoir 25). The meaning that Beauvoir describes might not be the same meaning Merleau-Ponty describes. It seems as though Merleau-Ponty is describing a meaning that holds everything together: why we do the things we do. This meaning for him sprouts from ambiguity and is built on top of it. Beauvoir is describing a meaning in the facticity and inescapability of ambiguity. Beauvoir suggests that meaning comes from accepting and wrestling with ambiguity in good faith. Merleau-Ponty shows his understanding that there is ambiguity, but still suggests there is a greater meaning, a meaning tied to how the world has interacted with each other.

Fanon, like Beauvoir, accepts the ambiguity of the world, but Fanon emphasizes that ambiguity can be obscured. “The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed.” (Fanon 95). Here, Fanon shows that the ambiguity of the world is not equally available. The racialized gaze reifies him, turning him into an object, stripping the ambiguity of his selfhood away. Fanon, as discussed earlier, does not abandon freedom. He is just suggesting that the weight of the white gaze insists he not be. Still, his very ability to reflect on this situation shows that he is free. It is not freedom arising from neutral ambiguity but from the tension between objectification and lived self-awareness. This conflicts with Merleau-Ponty’s notions of meaning harmoniously arising from ambiguity. Ambiguity is not the seed of freedom. The world violently denies ambiguity for Fanon. He needs to fight to reclaim ambiguity, which is what creates freedom.

Fanon resists any attempt to render the world as fully intelligible or ordered. he shows how racialized individuals are not simply co-constituting meaning through free interaction with the world, but are instead interpellated into roles they did not choose. When Fanon is called a slur on the bus, it captures the violence of being named, seen, and fixed in place by another’s gaze (Fanon 89). This kind of rupture is not a moment of ambiguous freedom but of existential shattering, an encounter that cannot be integrated into Merleau-Ponty’s harmonious, sedimented mosaic of perception. For Fanon, the body is not always a site of pre-reflective meaning-making but can instead become an object of surveillance and control, stripped of its capacity to act freely. His account of embodied life foregrounds the breakdowns in shared meaning, the moments where sedimentation fails and violence rushes in. In this sense, Fanon offers an indispensable reminder: Freedom cannot be understood solely as a process of self-shaping within a world that already makes sense. Sometimes, that world must be ruptured for freedom to emerge at all.

Is Merleau-Ponty useful or harmful? Ultimately, I think Merleau-Ponty has provided a lot of useful philosophy, but specifically, the way he describes the world so analytically cannot cover everything. There is more to the world than he describes, and I think he knows that, but the way Beauvoir describes freedom is just way too useful to me. I suppose it depends on what you want to get out of it. In phenomenology, where it’s your job to describe the world, Merleau- Ponty did a pretty good job. As a reader, wanting clarity for the world I live in, I prefer Beauvoir and Fanon. Which is why they aren’t doing phenomenology. The experience I had reading Beauvoir and Fanon was real, whereas Merleau-Ponty felt like a Wikipedia entry. That’s not inherently a bad thing; I’ve been down many a Wikipedia rabbit hole and am grateful for it. When discussing what it means to perceive, live and be a human, I might turn to Wikipedia for some answers but not for relating to others. Fanon does a great job showing this with his fluid writing and use of poetry. Poetry is an amazing way to get extremely close to conveying human experience. Still, poetry falls short, phenomenology falls short, and science falls short. Merleau- Ponty does do a great job using metaphors which transport your mind to similar scenarios. Yet, each of the individual methods of conveying human experience falls short in some way and is better in others. The problem is that Merleau-Ponty tried to use these methods to put piecewise parts together. Beauvoir and Fanon did not attempt to put the parts together. They used some of the methods Merleau-Ponty did, but they weren’t building a structure, instead, they called it as they saw it. Beauvoir and Fanon wrote about what they knew and didn’t try to dissect it into parts of a whole, they gave us the whole. As mentioned, they aren’t exactly trying to compete, but still, when put against each other, there is a clear winner in my eyes. That being said, the individual parts of Merleau-Ponty are fascinating and, I think, do a better job at getting closer to being satisfying. This is because those parts are only describing life, not trying to make it comprehensive. That’s what I think phenomenology should do: describe perception but not try to solve life.

Works Cited

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Phenomenology of Perception”, Translated by: Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2012. de Beauvoir, Simone. “The Ethics Of Ambiguity”, Translated by: Bernard Frechtman, Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corp., 1948. Fanon, Frantz, “Black Skin White Masks”, Translated by: Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.