Phenomenology Climbing Mountains: A Critique of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” via Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception”

Calvin Monley

English A427-Romanticism

Final Research Paper

12 / 16 / 09

Phenomenology Climbing Mountains: A Critique of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” via Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception”

Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” is one of two notable compositions the poet produced in the first half of 1816 (Reiman 26). Written in July of that year and inspired by Shelley’s view of Europe’s tallest mountain from a bridge spanning the River Arve in the valley of Chamonix in southeastern France, the poem is a rich debate and synthesis of much enlightenment epistemology. Shelley capitalizes on an inherent tension between “questions about the human mind, its powers, and the limits of knowledge” and “the sheer destructive power of the mountain” (Norton 763) that flows out his experience of viewing such an overwhelming sight. The poet resolves this tension by distilling the idea of a universal mind, a prime mover external and apart from the world, a power that goes unobserved, symbolized by the top of Mont Blanc. This mind is sublimely beyond human comprehension, though Shelley’s idea of poetic inspiration offers at least some people a way to tap into universal knowledge and to see as the mind sees. As Dr. Schwartz points out, there is a tension, too, in this resolution because the universal mind is decidedly disinterested in the world it has created, poetic genius is necessarily engaged in that world. However, this is acceptable because if Romantic poetry is about anything, it’s tension and contradiction.

The ideas “Mont Blanc” presents are interesting and philosophically import in so far as they are characteristically romantic. However, the role of this paper is not to defend them, but to critique them in the light of French phenomenology, specifically the philosophy of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We will begin by fleshing out the epistemology and poetic theory that “Mont Blanc” presents us with, comment on its philosophical context, and then go to town on it, armed with ideas presented in Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.” In doing so, we find that the existence of human consciousness is in no way dependant on any universal mind, and that the universal mind is in no way necessary for the mutually exclusive paths of “awful doubt” (77) or “faith so mild” (77) to present themselves. Poetic inspiration has its root not in participation in the universal mind, but in the mystery of being revealing itself through perception.

“Mont Blanc” is a poem of 144 pentameter lines, irregularly rhymed and divided into five separate sections which taken together form a cohesive argument (Reiman 26). In outlining this argument, we will rely heavily on the summary offered by Shelley scholar Donald Reiman. In part I,

Impressions of the “universe of things” (external nature, the world outside the human mind) flow through the passive universal mind, as a great river flows through a ravine; the stream is fed by two active forces, of which the “source of human thought”...is to the great “universe of things” as “a feeble brook “(7) is to a “vast river” (10) (Reiman 26).

Part II finds Shelley giving an apostrophe to the ravine of the River Arve, representing the universal mind (Reiman 27). The world flowing through it is symbolized by the River Arve (Reiman 27). The human mind, “my own separate phantasy” (36) and “Once legion of wild thoughts” (41) is characterized by self-consciousness, the human subject reflecting on himself (Reiman 27). This is the meaning of “[floating] above [the] darkness [of the Ravine]” (42) (Reiman 27). Self-consciousness is “feeble and limited” in its search for knowledge, so much so that it can only discover “the secrets of nature” through a “plunge back into the unconscious pool of the universal mind” (Reiman 27). This is where poetic inspiration is useful. Only in the “still cave of the witch Poesy” (44) can images “of all things that are” (46) be accessed (Reiman 27). Poetic inspiration makes recollected images return to “the breast/ from which they fled,” (47-8) making things real again (Norton 764). The universal mind is the source of poetic inspiration and poetic inspiration is the only way to access the universal mind. Hence, because not everyone has poetic genius – humanity needs poets to illuminate the depths of the universal mind so that ordinary people might understand their world and make sense of their lives.

True to the Kantian idea of a limit, Mont Blanc poses a problem to human understanding, but it is a problem poetic genius can transcend. Hence, Shelley is surprised at first by his ability to “see for the first time the meaning of Mont Blanc” (Reiman 27). He wonders for a while whether divine illumination or some mental capacity unlocked only in dreams has brought him thus far (Reiman 27). Mont Blanc is “still, snowy and serene” (61). It is uninhabited and unobserved. Though it was created by geological processes, it does not show it (Reiman 27) for as Shelley says, “all seems eternal now” (75). The mountain’s raw power to, through its glaciers, destroy the homes of both men and animals, uproot and crush trees, and shift massive amounts of land leaves human consciousness in awe and with only two options. Either we despair at nature’s indifference to human existence or we reconcile ourselves with it via the humility of “a faith so mild” (77), the celebrating of our own insignificance and mortality. The power has the capacity to overthrow tyranny (Reiman 27), but the voice of the power is only audible to those who have the capacity and patience to listen, like poets. The message that the power communicates is that every living creature “Within the daedal earth” (86) is subject to a cycle of birth and death, to creation and destruction. This includes man. The power itself dwells apart and “is not mortal and not subject to change” (Reiman 28). Thus,

God is not simply a very big man. [There] is an unbridgeable gulf between everything that man experiences with natural creation and the originating “Power” that exists beyond the limits of human cognition” (Reiman 28).

The cycle, and thus the power, is as much creative as destructive. The devastating glaciers “are also the source of the River Arve, which is “breath ad blood of distant lands” (124) (Reiman 28). Part V described the power itself, again symbolized by the summit of Mont Blanc (Reiman 28). This power creates much to be observed, but itself goes unobserved (Reiman 28). It is indifferent to human existence, above it and beyond it. However, the final three lines invert this and give primacy to the human imagination, especially the poetic imagination. As Reiman says, “The prismatic human imagination, however, has the ability to reflect and refract the cold blank whiteness of benighted snow into the beautiful colors of the rainbow, giving joy to men during their lives and a hope for survival beyond the grave” (Reiman 29).

Tracing the different sources of the epistemology of “Mont Blanc” and evaluating the originality of Shelley’s ideas would itself make an interesting paper. For our purposes it is enough to talk briefly about the broad philosophical context Shelley was writing in. Romanticism, as a philosophical and artistic movement, grows out of and in reaction to enlightenment philosophy, particularly philosophy of subjectivity. We are not talking of subjectivity in a moral sense, but in an epistemological one. To be a subject is to possess consciousness, awareness of self and of the external world. A pivotal moment in western philosophy is the “subjective turn” beginning with the publishing of Descartes’ Meditations in 1641. In the second meditation Descartes proclaims “cogito ergo sum” and turns philosophy away from inquiry into the objective, external world and towards what it means to be a thinking and knowing subject. Descartes asserts that to doubt the world and even one’s own existence is itself an affirmation of one’s own existence. Doubting is an act of thinking, and one cannot think unless one exists. From then on, philosophers become intensely interested in the conditions of knowing, of whether knowledge arises out of experience or pure thought, and whether anything can be known with certainty. Some such as Leibniz and Spinoza assert that knowledge comes from categories of pure reason independent of experience while skeptics like Hume believe that all we can know is sense experience. The most significant enlightenment figure writing on the conditions of subjectivity is, without doubt, Immanuel Kant. Kant wisely strides a middle ground between empiricism and rationalism, between realism and idealism. Kant posits that knowledge begins in sense experience, but is not reducible to it. The moment we experience anything though our senses, categories of a priori knowledge flow through our consciousness and give order to our sensations. Through this process a posteriori knowledge is constituted. Especially relevant to our analysis is the Kantian idea of a limit. A limit concept is a wall beyond which human knowledge cannot reach – the summit of Mont Blanc. It is a point at which knowledge (sensation ordered by understanding) fails. For instance, we cannot picture a universal mind because we know only our particular minds and cannot conceptualize independently of them. However, the idea of the sublime, of sublimity, is that which can step to the other side of a limit, can look back on itself inside the limit. This is the role Shelley would assign to poetic genius. As Professor Schwartz says, through the idea of “Mont Blanc” Shelley is able to summit Mont Blanc the mountain and give primacy to the poetic imagination.

Now, a bit about phenomenology. Phenomenology is a significant twentieth century philosophical movement developed in both reaction to and synthesis of the legacy of the “subjective turn” in western philosophy, the entire enlightenment tradition, and the modern social sciences. The movement develops out of the transcendental, post-Kantian philosophy of Edmund Husserl and goes in a wide variety of directions, but a few core ideas remain common to every philosopher properly called a phenomenologist. These are: the primacy of lived experience, eidetic essences, and intentionality and they will be explained as they become relevant to our criticism of “Mont Blanc.” French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Primacy of Perception” is a classic phenomenological work. It explains in fifteen pages his fundamental phenomenological conviction that perception is the “original modality of consciousness” (MP 12). Humans, before any abstract thought or reflection, simply perceive. Perception, like all phenomenological consciousness, is characterized by intentionality. I cannot grasp pure perception. I can only grasp an object which is external to my own consciousness. Conscious states are never empty. I dream a dream; I think a thought. Consciousness is always related to that which is not itself. Objects present themselves as wholes in my perception. I always grasp them from a limited perspective, but they are wholes. I can change position and see things from new perspective, but no amount of movement will exhaust an object. The unseen side of an object, too, is grasped by perception, grasped in its absence.

I grasp the unseen side [of a lamp] as present, and I do not affirm that the back of the lamp exists in the same way that I say the solution of a problem exists. The hidden side is present in its own way. It is my vicinity (MP 14).

Perception is my window to the external world. I perceive via my body in the world and the world itself appears to me as possibilities for action. Merleau-Ponty, like Kant, walks a middle line between idealism and realism, rationalism and empiricism. There is an external world, but our mind shapes it through structures of consciousness presenting the first level perception. Perception is not simple sensation, nor is it pure understanding. It is a seamless blend of sensation ordered by understanding. We exist in a world with others, and we access their subjectivity via our perceptions. In short:

By these words, “the primacy of perception” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself (MP 25).

With all this in mind we are finally in a position to critique “Mont Blanc.” Note that we are not claiming the privilege Merleau-Ponty gives to perception to be complete truth. The paper is simply entertaining that privilege for the purposes of a lively and interesting critique of Shelley. Merleau-Ponty would, above all, take issue with the primacy “Mont Blanc” gives to the universal mind. For Merleau-Ponty, our individual consciousnesses are our primary knowledge of the “Everlasting universe of things” (1) that is the external world. We gain knowledge not by some mysterious participation in a greater intellect that our own, but simply through the structures of our own consciousness. Self-consciousness does indeed arise from an interaction “between mind and matter’ (Reiman 27), but that mind is our pre-reflective perception of the world. Our self-consciousness is as intentional to raw perception as are objects in the world. Sartre, another phenomenologist, terms this “the pre-reflexive cogito.” Merleau-Ponty would probably like the feeble brook” (7) to “vast river” analogy because perception, while it does access being, is never exhaustive and a single perception always opens wider doors. But he would not agree with the passivity Shelley assigns to the human mind. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is an intentional, active grasping of the external world. We perceive as living bodies and the perceived world always opens up possibilities for action in thought, word and deed.

For Merleau-Ponty, “Mont Blanc” the poem ideally would serve to celebrate the infinite and beautiful perspectives the mountain offers, perspectives ”pregnant with form” and meaning (MP12). The twin perspectives on man’s place in nature that the poem offers: “awful doubt” (77) or “faith so mild” (77) are not contradictory truth-values. Rather, in the process of perception by which meaning and truth reveal themselves, these are reconcilable contradictions.

There is a vain form of contradiction which consists in affirming two theses which exclude one another at the same time and under the same aspect. And then there are…contradictions present at the very heart of time and of all relationships…the justified contradictions of transcendental logic. The objection…would be admissible only if we could put a system of eternal truths in the place of the perceived world, freed from its contradictions (MP 19).

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty would probably celebrate the contradictions and tensions between irreconcilable ideas present in romantic literature, because these contradictions are unavoidable realities of the perceived world and the meaning it reveals. Merleau-Ponty might very well place poetic inspiration at the point where the perceiving subject searches for a way to totalize and unify perception and the meaning therein. Thus romantic poetry would be a poetic ideal because it is riddled with contradiction and process, just like any attempt to unify perceptions in the world. But all this is pretty speculative.

The final question in our analysis, and one this paper does not claim to answer, is what to do with the Kantian Sublime. Note that this paper is entitled “Phenomenology Climbing Mountains,” not “Phenomenology Summiting Mountains.” As Angela Leighton points out, “ it is the purpose and greatness of ‘Mont Blanc’ to dare the unimaginable…[to] quest for origins; for that Power which, through infinitely apart, might nonetheless be apprehended by the imagination” (Leighton 70). Shelley’s solution is a sublime transcendence of the limits of the particular mind into the depths of the universal mind. Merleau-Ponty would take issue with the universal mind, but what he would make of speculation on a deistic God, a power apart from and cause of the external world we perceive – this is an open question. Is the sublime necessary for apprehension of such of power, or is human cognition capable of it alone? All that can be said with certainty is that, whatever position Merleau-Ponty would assign the sublime and whether he would think it accessible only through poetic genius or not, it would all be apprehended through perception. To try to envision the top of Mont Blanc, to try to envision of universal mind or first mover, is to perceive them in our imaginations, is to make ourselves present before them. As Merleau-Ponty says:

I cannot even for an instant imagine an object in itself. As Berkeley said, if I attempt to imagine some place in the world which has never been seen, the very fact that I imagine it makes me present at that place (MP 16)

Works Cited

Leighton, Angela. Shelly and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge

UP: Cambridge, 1984.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences”.

James M. Edie translator.

Reiman, Donald H. Percy Bysshe Shelly. Updated ed. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1990.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D The Romantic Period. Jack Stillinger and

Deidre Shauna Lynch ed. W.W. Norton and Co: New York, 2006. (Please note that this

source references supplemental material to “Mont Blanc”, namely footnotes.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D

The Romantic Period. 8^th ed. W.W. Norton and Co: New York, 2006. (Note that this

source will be intertextually cited without author and by line number).