The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness in Merleau-Ponty's 'Phenomenology of Perception'

This dissertation provides an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's pivotal text, Phenmomenology of Perception. In contrast to the standard reading, which sees this text as a problematic and insufficient articulation of the author's philosophy that would only be worked through in the fragmentary pages of The Visible and the Invisible, I argue that the earlier text closely anticipates the later developments of Merleau-Ponty's thought insofar as it can be said to articulate a philosophy of "ontological lateness." The concept of ontological lateness designates the manner in which, according to Merleau-Ponty, philosophical reflection perpetually fails to coincide with its objects—a failure that is by no means incidental but is a function of philosophical reflection's immersion in the temporal flux that phenomenological method discloses as the transcendental field. That is, philosophical reflection is late because it finds itself in the grip of the total "dehiscence" and éclatement or "eruption" of sense in its becoming. Insofar as Merleau-Ponty understands the expressivity and articulateness of sense as a temporal structure of what Husserl would call Ablauf or "expiration," an expiration that always fails to achieve the density of completed being, the lateness at play not only describes the delay of phenomenological method behind its object, but the lateness of the becoming of sense to being—ontological lateness. By examining the manner in which this sense of lateness plays out across the pages of Phenomenology of Perception —including the chapters Le sentir, La temporalité and La liberté—this text can be shown to evince a style of thinking much closer to The Visible and the Invisible than has been previously acknowledged.