that is a question of facts rather than rules. For example, “I cannot remember the future” runs contrary to certain fundamental Western understandings because it fails to adhere to the grammatical rules of usage. The proposition makes no sense since it defies the logic of grammatical convention rather than empirical fact: we simply do not use ‘remember’ in this way, to take as its object the future. But the proposition “I have only one body” is not a question of rules of usage; instead, it is bound up with empirical matters of fact.
Despite the difference between them, however, both kinds of proposition run irremediably between the analytic and the synthetic. Grammatical propositions constitute the logic of a language and the basis on which people act and make meaning. In this sense, they are a priori and enjoy an analytic nature. But plainly, as ‘rules’ of grammar, even if implicit ones, they are also subject to the material process of history and are thus synthetic. Hence, they obtain halfway between the formal and the factual or contingent. The other sort of a priori propositions have the form of ordinary empirical propositions but enjoy a special ontological status. “It is clear that our empirical propositions do not all have the same status,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 167), “since one can lay down such a proposition and turn it from an empirical proposition into a norm of description.” By “norm of description,” Wittgenstein intends a proposition that “gives our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts. (Every human being has parents.)” (ibid.: § 211). Such presuppositions are bound up, not with rules of usage, but with the way things are and what there is. They serve as pinions of reality, and, in this sense, may be thought of as analytic or even transcendental. But Wittgenstein's characterization of them as empirical propositions transformed into norms of description suggests that they too are synthetic in nature. Moreover, just as, like any rules, the rules of grammar are subject to change, so such hard propositions can lose their special status among empirical propositions. For example, whereas we have ordinarily always presupposed that every human being has two, and only two, parents, with the invention of the technology of surrogate motherhood, whereby the biological processes of ovulation and gestation are divided between two women, is it not the case that now some children may be said to have not two but three parents?7
Although on the surface of it, there do seem to be differences between grammatical and hard propositions, it is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different. Gier himself (1981: 175) suggests that the appearance of the distinction in Wittgenstein's work “reveals some possible confusion in Wittgenstein's thinking.” I have brought Gier's discussion to bear here because it is exceedingly helpful in clarifying Wittgenstein's focus on the question of the a priori. For my purposes, what is important to see is that both grammatical and hard propositions constitute synthetic a priori. As such, neither is normally a question of truth or falsity; rather, both embody the conditions for determining what is true and what is false. In addition, both confound the distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic, or reason and fact, such that these distinctions are rendered essentially fuzzy and less than fast.
Merleau-Ponty
In his monumental work, Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes Kant to task for failing to follow out his own program, “which was to define our cognitive powers in terms of our factual condition” (1962: 220–21). Had Kant done so, finds Merleau-Ponty, he would have arrived at “a new definition of the a priori” (ibid.: 220), in which the a priori is no longer cleanly distinguishable from the a posteriori: “From the moment that experience—that is, the opening on to our de facto world—is recognized as the beginning of knowledge, there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of a priori truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is” (ibid.: 221). Put in a nutshell (ibid.: 394): “[E]very truth of fact is a truth of reason, and vice versa” So much for Kant's continued adherence to a dualism of form and content, or of the analytic and the empirical.
In order to explain himself, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 394) appeals to a phenomenological notion of “founding” (Fundierung), by which he has in mind a dynamic two-way relationship, in which one sort of truth serves to found another, which in turn acts back on the first sort, making itself more than derivative and the founding truth less than primary. That is to say, in our practical engagement of the world, we manage, especially by means of language, to transform truths of fact into truths of reason. Although the latter truths can never break entirely free from their founding facts, they become sedimented into cultural forms (into, as Wittgenstein would say, the “scaffolding” of our thoughts) and therewith inform the facts from which they derive, giving these facts, irremovably, a cultural character. In light of this dynamic picture of essential ambiguity, ultimately there is no distinguishing between the two kinds of truth, and wherever they can be distinguished, the distinction is relative. This I take it is what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he maintains (ibid.: 393–94) that “there is not one of my actions…which has not been directed toward a value or a truth…Conversely, there is not one truth of reason which does not retain its coefficient of facticity.”
In order to demonstrate that ideas or truths of reason are always tied to being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty takes up Descartes’ example (in his Fifth Meditation, but harking back to Plato and forward to Kant) of the triangle as a pure idea, that is, as an idea in itself, cleanly detached from the empirical world. Merleau-Ponty's discussion is involved (1962: 383ff.; cf. Hall 1979), but the following highly anthropological observation by him—evocative of Wittgenstein's that “norms of description” can grow from hard to soft propositions—suffices here to indicate the spirit of his point (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394): “[T]he alleged transparency of Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as operative for a certain period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that, for a time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional space as the ‘ground’ of their thoughts, and to assume unquestioningly what generalized science will come to consider as a contingent account of space.”
What, then, of the other side of the two-way relationship he called “founding”? If, as against intellectualism, the truths of reason are always derivative, then must we, as dualism bids us, plump for empiricism? But the whole of Merleau-Ponty's great book is geared to show that neither empiricism nor intellectualism can do the ontological trick. For the founding facts in which Merleau-Ponty's “founding” begins are, like Wittgenstein's hard propositions, far from ordinary empirical facts. Instead, they are matters of basic ambiguity. Such ambiguity, which cannot be “resolved” but can be “understood as ultimate” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394), recalls Wittgenstein's thesis of truths that can be shown but, precisely because they are imprisoned in practice and do not stop for logical logic, cannot be said.
Merleau-Ponty, providing a loose and open-ended list of terms, does speak of the “founding term, or originator”: “time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception” (1962: 394). But he uses none of these terms here in an ordinary sense. Let me take up “perception” alone, as this concept forms the axis of his phenomenology and may serve to elucidate the other terms. “[T]he perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence,” he says (1964b: 13). Merleau-Ponty is interested in the presuppositions of our existence, the world as we live it before we reflect on it, which is what he means by “the perceived world.” Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, the perceiving being cannot be in the first place a pure consciousness, as it is for, say, Descartes and Kant. Otherwise it would be, instead of pre-reflective, a disengaged self, like Descartes’ cogito or Kant's transcendental ego. In order to transcend this dualistic conception of the perceiver as that which is wholly set over and against the world, Merleau-Ponty renders the perceiving being as a body-subject. Obviously, by making it out as no less bodily than mindful, Merleau-Ponty construes it, not as detached from but as participating in the world. In which case, unlike Descartes’ ‘I think’, which extends in neither space nor time, it must be a matter of temporality and facticity.
Since the body-subject ‘thinks’,
