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In connection with working out Merleau-Ponty’s probable view of law according to the model of language as a system of expressive possibilities, the last chapter dwelt at length on H.L.A. Hart’s theory of rules. This was not due to the fact that Merleau-Ponty was influenced by Hart; in fact, there is no evidence that the former had ever read his Oxford contemporary. Nor was it owing to any sort of reverse influence, for Hart has stated explicitly that he has never read Merleau-Ponty.1 It is, rather, because it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Hart’s contributions to the philosophy of law, and the impressiveness of his work makes all the more significant the close similarity of his thought to conceiving law according to the model of language. In the best sense of the traditional task of philosophers to “save the phenomena,” he has managed to save that of law from its distortions at the hands of earlier positivists, the American Legal Realists, and pure formalists of various stripes. And he has done so with such lucidity and persuasiveness that his work certainly constitutes a “decisive sedimentation” (S 194), back beyond which it will not be possible to go in the philosophy of law.2

The subject here is what Merleau-Ponty’s views of nature, both human and external, and our cultural relationships with it, can tell us about the ideals of respect for law and fidelity to it. Historically, these ideals have often been supported by the fact that law included more than the mere fiat of a given sovereign, and the power relationships entailed by that will, by somehow having a foundation in “the nature of things.” That is, law sought to better human life in part by seeking the most appropriate social organization of, and manipulation of, external nature and also what appeared to best suit “natural human needs and capacities.”

We have now traversed, across the Introduction and the first four chapters of this work, the main features of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the social world as they are expressed in the cultural mediation of nature, intersubjectivity, history and the origin of meaning, ethics, and politics. Running through all these themes and connecting them at various junctures is the notion of language analysed according to de Saussure’s distinctions of la langue and la parole, on the one hand, and the synchronic and the diachronic, on the other. Following the interplay of these perspectives on language, we have seen how Merleau-Ponty finds them illuminative of the bonds of intersubjective communication, creative expression in the origin and change of meaning, the nature of history (at least up to a point), and politics.

As is clear from the last four chapters, one would not find anything in Merleau-Ponty’s texts resembling a fully developed discussion of law and morality. And certainly one would find nothing of the way this issue has been skewed in most discussions of it in the previous two decades of Anglo-American philosophy by being focussed almost exclusively on sexuality.1 Instead, as with Merleau-Ponty’s other references to law, those that concern morality are usually situated in the contexts of politics, economics, and history. Although productive of less exciting discussions, perhaps, these contexts do at least have the compensatory advantage of generating more interesting and thorny philosophical problems.

Philosophy, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, always comprises a return “to an intersubjectivity which, ever more closely, binds us to the whole of history” (S 141). Accordingly, history is a subject with which Merleau-Ponty is concerned again and again throughout his works, from the earliest up to the very last writings. Across these texts, he is concerned to argue that history provides intersubjectivity with temporal depth by (i) furnishing a dimension of historicity to an individual consciousness, by (ii) anchoring our incarnate freedom in an established order of sedimented meanings, and finally by (iii) elaborating our relationships with others in the creation of truth, meaning, and rationality.

One: Epistemology and Ontology.- Structuring the Phenomenological Field: Reflections on a Daubert Manuscript.- Phenomenology and Relativism.- Memory and Phenomenological Method.- "Plato's Cave", Flatland and Phenomenology.- Time and Time-Consciousness.- Two: Social and Political Life.- "Left" and "Right" as Socio-Political Stances.- A Phenomenology of Coercion and Appeal.- Phenomenology as Psychic Technique of Non-Resistance.- The Self in Question.- Existential Phenomenology and Applied Philosophy.- Three: Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Values.- The Good and the Beautiful.- The Retributive Attitude and the Moral Life.- Kindness.- The Phenomenology of Symbol: Genesis I and II.- Epilogue: For the Third Generation of Phenomenologists Contributing to this Volume.

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