“Empirico-Transcendental Doublet” and “Eschatology”: Once Again on Foucault’s Critiques of Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

I will attempt to analyze Foucault’s famous critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in terms of an alleged oscillation between “positivism” and “eschatology”. As I will try to prove, attributing to Merleau-Ponty a “positivistic” reduction of epistemology would amount to overlooking his insistence on moving away from the self-interpretations that empirical sciences offer of their own results; that is to say, overlooking his phenomenological objections against the naïve ontological frames of “objective thinking”. As for the charge of “eschatology”, presumably applied to the phenomenologist by virtue of his debts to Marxist thought, I will try to show that —either understood in a strictly epistemological sense or in connection with an alleged Merleau-Pontyan adhesion to a philosophy of history— it proves untenable once we take into consideration the nuanced character of his acceptance of certain aspects of historical materialism.