Abstract

Phenomenology is associated with the motto 'to the things themselves', or even more tellingly, 'back to the things themselves'. This injunction makes sense only against the background belief that somehow we are at some remove from 'the things themselves' to which we are invited to return. In phenomenology, this 'origin' is variously determined as 'experience', 'existence', 'the life-world', and so on. ;Much depends upon how we understand this return that phenomenology advocates and practises. On one interpretation, phenomenology claims to extricate itself from prejudices, which distort or otherwise falsify 'experience', in favour of achieving a direct and presuppositionless contact with experience. ;Several commentators have argued that The Visible and the Invisible breaks with phenomenology in this sense. I argue that even in the Phenomenology of Perception phenomenology is less naive than Derrida and others would have us believe. Certain indications to the contrary notwithstanding, Merleau-Ponty attempts to articulate a conception of phenomenology that would take into account the fact that phenomenology is itself a point of view and as such mediates the disclosure of 'the things themselves'. ;Merleau-Ponty focuses this mediation with reference to language, and more precisely with reference to phenomenology as itself an instance of language. Such development as occurs in his philosophy fleshes out, and does not repudiate, the teaching of the Phenomenology concerning language and expression. The phenomenologist neither mirrors nor coincides with experience in the sense of a full presence on the other side of speech. He expresses experience, and his expression is necessarily a creative deed. ;Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is best characterized as an attempt to reconcile the ideas of adequation and creativity. It embraces both the demand to return to 'the things themselves', the demand to be faithful to experience, and the recognition that, in virtue of its own linguisticality, phenomenology's rendering of experience is necessarily creative. This tension, which I trace throughout Merleau-Ponty's writings, is what is comprehended in the paradoxical expression 'creative adequation'