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Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the leading figures of French existentialism. Like Sartre, with whom he founded Les Temps modernes, he sought the practical, and notably political, application of Ms theoretical findings. The German and English reader will be primarily interested in his theory, however, which tends to embrace a large area of both philosophy and psychology.
It has always been astonishing to me that phenomenology and analytical psychology have not yet taken real notice of one another. For half a century Husserl (the father of modern phenomenology) and Jung—to mention but two broad-minded representatives of their respective fields—had been publishing their findings as contemporaries, apparently without realizing what close neighbours they were. While Husserl was looking for the factors in consciousness that constitute reality, Jung developed his theory of archetypes as the patterns of knowledge and located them in the unconscious. It is probable that for any comparison of these two theories a concept of consciousness is crucial.
This becomes clear in the main part of the volume, entitled Die Humanwissenschaften und die Phänomenologie (Human Sciences and Phenomenology). In the first section Merleau-Ponty outlines Husserl's ideas on the respective positions of psychology and phenomenology: Psychology is a science of facts (Tatsachenwissenschaft) and as such is ‘naive’ and ‘unreflective’; phenomenology, however, has performed Kant's so-called ‘Copernican turn’, which is to say that it has realized that ‘world’ and ‘consciousness’ are correlates, neither existing without the other. Furthermore, only phenomenology is concerned with meaning (which goes beyond mere facts). One wonders whether Merleau-Ponty, had he known Jung, would have categorized him as a psychologist or as a philosopher—particularly as elsewhere in this book he defines the philosopher as someone who has a sense for ‘evidence’ and ‘ambiguity’!
The present volume contains, in addition to the ab