From the Tower of Babel to the Ladder

of Jacob: Claude Imbert Reading

Merleau-Ponty
SOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE

Abstract:
Claude Imbert often declares that the activity of philosophy now needs to be
in line with the teachings of anthropology. In her book Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
the very fact that the last course of the author of Phenomenology of Perception,
questioning ‘The Possibility of Philosophy’, sketched out ‘the anthropological
outline of an intellectual activity unburdened by any a priori’ [les contours
anthropologiques d’un activité intellectuelle délestée de tout a priori] is considered
by her as more evidence for such a necessity. My contribution explores the
meaning of Claude Imbert’s affirmation that today the possibility of philosophy
is deeply connected with anthropological knowledge. It will, in particular,
confront such an affirmation with the debate among African philosophers,
concerning the relationship between philosophical activity and ethnography.

Keywords: anthropology, logic, phenomenology, translation, universal

language

On August 6, 1967, the well known logician and companion of

Leon Trotsky, Jean Van Heijenoort sent, from the US, a letter
written in French to his friend, another well known Trotskyist figure,
the sociologist Jean Naville. Among other things, Van Heijenoort
informed his friend that ‘the French translator of Frege, Claude
Imbert, just got a fellowship to travel to the US and spend some time
at Cambridge, from August 15 to the end of October’.1 A few days
later, on August 24, he sent another letter explaining some point of
mathematics to Naville. He then went on to say that as announced,
‘Claude Imbert, the French translator of Frege, is now in Cambridge’.
‘She has much to learn’, he paternalistically added, ‘but is full of good

Paragraph 34.2 (2011): 244–256

DOI: 10.3366/para.2011.0020
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/para
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 245
will’. After a third letter dated October 14, 1967 in which he provided
again some information about his mentee, welcoming the opportunity
to speak French with her, he would mention her again, writing to
Naville a year later,2 to let him know that ‘the publication by C. Imbert
of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic is now impending’. He also gave
his friend C. Imbert’s address. Following that information, a few days
after, on October 7, Pierre Naville wrote a letter to Claude Imbert
asking her permission to publish in advance, in his journal Epistémologie
sociologique, her translation of Frege’s ‘On Sense and Reference’. In
her answer,3 Claude Imbert expressed her willingness to see Frege’s
famous article published in the journal after a few months and offered
to contribute to it in the future.
Claude Imbert’s French translation of Frege’s Foundations of
Arithmetic eventually came out in 1970;4 it was followed, one year later,
by the translation of the German logician’s Logical and Philosophical
Writings.5 A few months earlier, in 1969, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
unfinished work The Prose of the World [La Prose du monde]6 had been
posthumously published. Without forcing the issue and making too
much of such a concomitance, it is possible to trace a link between
the study of formular languages that C. Imbert was pursuing through
her translation of Frege, and Merleau-Ponty’s meditation on what he
called, in the very title of the Prose of the World’s first chapter, ‘the
spectre of a pure language’ [le fantôme d’un langage pur].7
Claude Imbert will use almost the same phrase as Merleau-Ponty
when she writes, toward the end of her ‘Introduction’ to Pour une
histoire de la logique, that many of our logical problems come from the
fact that we have ‘received the spectre of an absolute language, of
a universal logic, not to mention some synoptical ambition’ (Imbert
1999c, 56).8 The image of the spectre expresses the way in which the
ideal of the pre-Babel Adamic language has been a haunting presence
in the history of logic and philosophy — that is ‘the ideal of a language
which in the last analysis will deliver us from language by delivering us
to things’ and which ‘recovers, in the heart of things, the word which
made the thing’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 4). That is why, Imbert writes,
two different ‘philosophical families’, both claiming their commitment
to realism, that of sense data (Logical atomism) or that of ‘the return to
the things themselves’ (Husserl’s phenomenology), would still converge
towards the ideal of a mathesis universalis in which ‘objects, operations
defined on them, and the thought about the former and the latter
would be blended and mirrored in a common “characteristic” system.’
(Imbert 1992b, 22)9
246 Paragraph
Such an ideal appears clearly in the very intention to realize
through the ideography ‘the laws of pure thought’, an expression used
by the two logicians who achieved, at the end of the nineteenth
century, Leibniz’s program of a lingua characterica universalis and a
calculus ratiocinator: George Boole (1815–1864) and Gottlob Frege
(1848–1925).10 In a letter to Hilbert cited by Imbert, Frege explains
that the quest for a pure language has to do with that of the
good symbolism, the ‘language of signs in which research could be
conducted with (. . .) clarity and precision’. Such ‘clarity and precision’
would be impossible to obtain ‘using words’ and inevitably would
bump into the obstacle of the ‘slowness, vagueness and imprecision
of [natural] language.’ And he goes on to question whether the
symbolical languages invented by Boole, Schröder, and Peano were not
mistakenly designed before the need they had to respond to was clearly
defined.11
Boole is precisely the one who re-emphasized, in the most recent
developments of the discipline, the Leibnizian notion that by finding its
expression in the language of algebraic signs and operations, logic had
retrieved the Adamic language which is at bottom what is ‘common
and universal’ in the ‘unnumbered tongues and dialects of the earth’
and, as such, ‘has been preserved through a long succession of ages’.
What is ‘common and universal’ in all tongues and dialects, Boole
continues, thus bears witness to the ‘existence of some deep foundation
of their agreement in the laws of the mind itself ’ (Boole 1854, 17).
There is a genuine and fundamental optimism in Boole’s work about
the capacity of the symbolism to mirror in the laws of signs the laws
of our thought and the laws of things. That is why the symbolism of
algebraic logic can be seen as the language of pure thought expressing
itself directly without the resistance that the thickness of our natural
tongues inevitably oppose to it, thus ‘delivering us from language by
delivering us to things’ (Boole 1854, 17). So after he has presented the
different elements that constitute his symbolical system, Boole states
the following:

We may, if such speculation is not altogether vain, permit ourselves to conjecture

that these are the conditions which would be obeyed in the employment of
language as an instrument of expression and of thought, by unerring beings,
declaring simply what they mean, without suppression on the one hand, and
without repetition on the other. Considered both in their relation to the idea of a
perfect language, and in their relation to the processes of an exact method, these
conditions are equally worthy of the attention of the student. (Boole 1854, 123)
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 247
We may think of those ideal ‘unerring beings’ as the pre-Babel
humanity.
Of course the possibility of reconstructing such a pure universal
grammar of thought means that there is only one logica perennis.
It means, in particular, that Aristotle’s Logic, and the dialectics
of the Stoics should be perfectly translatable, for example, in the
syntax of Fregean and post-Fregean formula languages. Precisely,
Claude Imbert’s two books following her translations of Frege’s works,
Phénoménologies et langues formulaires (Imbert 1992b) (which could be
translated as: Phenomenologies and Formula Languages) and Pour une
histoire de la logique (1999c) (which could be translated as Towards a
History of Logic) present, among other aspects, an enlightening and
precise account of the disillusion of modern logic, Fregean and post-
Fregean, about the dream of overcoming what it had to recognize as
the fact of radically heterogeneous syntaxes that could not be unified in
a single grammar of thought. In the ‘Introduction’ to Phénoménologies et
langues formulaires, Claude Imbert describes the object of the book by
explaining that ‘the failure of logical formalism’ and ‘the imposition
of syntactical diversity’ became also a counter-argument against the
philosophies (represented by Russell and Husserl) which, ‘on both
sides of the English Channel, had shared the same purpose of uniting,
through a uniform logical mediation, the thematically disconnected
domains of physico-mathematical science and perceptive knowledge’
(Imbert 1992b, 5–6).
The failure of the logico-mathematical ideal also meant the need to
open up to another form of investigation (than the Logical Investigations
of the earlier Husserl) that would start by taking into consideration
the necessity to find its point of departure in ‘the disconnectedness of
languages’ and ‘Jacob’s ladder of disconnected intelligibilities’ (Imbert
2008a, 60). It is not coincidental that Claude Imbert mentions such a
necessity a propos Merleau-Ponty and the reasons he had to abandon
his Prose of the World unfinished; it is not coincidental either that she
does so in a book devoted to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Because anthropology is precisely the opening, the unlocking of the
dead end after ‘the last illusion of a world’ (Imbert 2008, 60) has also
been taken away. In a book published a couple of years before that
which she devoted to Lévi-Strauss (Imbert 2008a) and devoted to
Merleau-Ponty himself, Claude Imbert had made the remark that the
ultimate stage of the phenomenologist’s trajectory had taken the form
of a question about the very ‘possibility of philosophy’ to which his
answer was to ‘sketch out the anthropological outlines of an intellectual
248 Paragraph
activity unburdened by any a priori’ (Imbert 2005a, 19). She writes
that ‘on the endpaper of his Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty
had, as in an aside, opened up the alternative of an anthropological
knowledge’ leading one ‘to consider contemporary societies (. . .)
with “the ingenuous eye the anthropologist has for pre-capitalist
societies” ’, and adding that Merleau-Ponty was thus reconnecting
with the first direction of his researches when, in 1933, he declared
that he wanted to take into account the teachings of ethnography
(Imbert 2005a, 44).
How are we to understand the trajectory that leads to
the anthropological unlocking? In a lecture delivered in 1931
entitled ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’, Edmund Husserl
forcefully reaffirmed his continuous opposition to what he labeled
‘anthropologism’ (and ‘psychologism’), in the name of the enterprise
of constructing ‘philosophy as rigorous science’. Philosophy, Husserl
argues, aims at absolute and definitive truths in its exploration of the
transcendental and thus has to turn its back on (or rather put in epochê)
mere empirical knowledge such as anthropology. The latter comes
under what Husserl would consider ‘a naïve investigation of the world’,
and therefore goes in the opposite direction to that which philosophy,
dealing with transcendental problems, must take: ‘A philosophy that
takes its start from human existence, Husserl writes, falls back into that
naiveté the overcoming of which has (. . .) been the whole meaning of
modernity.’12
The fierce opposition manifested by Husserl to anthropological
intervention in philosophical investigation still manifests his ideal of
an eidetics of a universal grammar for a language that, as Merleau-
Ponty wrote, empirical languages would represent only as a ‘confused
realization’.13 However, at the same time as Husserl was dismissing, in
the name of the transcendental, any knowledge tainted by historicity,
the acknowledgement of the ‘lived world’ had already become an
important feature of phenomenology. Which is, Merleau-Ponty writes
in a chapter about ‘The Philosopher and Sociology’, ‘only a more
resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the truth about
language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation
and first formulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our
life, and bound to their concrete structures’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a,
105). Husserl may maintain sharp delimitations between the natural,
naïve attitude and the transcendental one. It remains, nevertheless,
that the kind of universal that philosophy is aiming at will not be
obtained through a universal (or Adamic) language existing beyond or
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 249
beneath the diversity of empirical languages. It will be something to
be acquired through
an oblique passage from a given language that I speak and that initiates me into the
phenomenon of expression, to another given language that I learn to speak and
that effects the act of expression according to a completely different style — the
two languages (and ultimately all given languages) being contingently comparable
only at the outcome of this passage and only as signifying wholes, without our
being able to recognize in them the common elements of one single categorical
structure. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 87)

These words express the very important move that was made as a
departure from a philosophy looking for what Claude Imbert has
called ‘the philosopher’s stone of adequacy’ (Imbert 2005a, 48) (of
what is perceived to what is said), and pursuing the ideal of a ‘repre-
sentation that welds seeing to saying’ (Imbert 2005a, 53). The gesture
of subsuming natural languages to some universal symbolism is not
possible any more. On the contrary, we are taken back to our situation
of ‘speaking subjects’ and all we have as our point of departure is the
language we actually speak which is one among many others, some of
which we may also speak. Through navigation (or ‘oblique passages’)
between ‘different styles’ of expression represented in different lan-
guages we experiment the notion that the universal is not something
that hangs over the empirical but something we need to work out
through our lateral displacements between those styles.14 Our style is
tested by others as it tests them and it is only through that test that we
can start to grasp the significance of expression. Goethe’s declaration is
verified: one does not know one’s own language if one does not know
any other language.15 The universal is not any more the prerogative
of a language, it is to be experimented and maybe ‘acquired’ through
the lateral process of translation.16 That experience of the multiplicity
of styles is precisely what anthropology or ethnology brings. It is thus
impossible from now on to dismiss it the way Husserl did.
Or maybe we should say the earlier Husserl. Because in the end,
the phenomenologist himself had come to realize that the historic-
anthropological matters to the quest. That is the reason why Merleau-
Ponty, in the chapter of Signs entitled ‘The Philosopher and Sociology’
underlines the crucial importance of the letter addressed by Husserl
to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on March 11, 1935 after he read the latter’s
Primitive Mythology.17 In that letter, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘[Husserl]
seems to admit that the philosopher could not possibly have immediate
access to the universal by reflection alone — that he is in no position
250 Paragraph
to do without anthropological experience or to construct what
constitutes the meaning of other experiences and civilizations by a
purely imaginary variation of his own experiences.’ (Merleau-Ponty
1964a, 107)18
To ‘constitute (. . .) the meaning of other experiences and
civilizations by a purely imaginary variation of one’s own experiences’
could well be a definition of ethnocentrism in general, Euro-centrism
in particular here, in the case of Husserl. And there is certainly a
tension between the attitude expressed in the letter to Lévy-Bruhl — a
readiness to submit philosophical inquiry to the test of anthropological
experience — and, for example, the fierce defense of Europe’s unique
telos to be found in Husserl’s Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man,
the lecture he gave that same year 1935, less than two months after
his letter to Lévy-Bruhl, on May 7. Here again Husserl is dismissive
of anthropological pluralism as containing any possible lesson for the
enterprise of philosophy. One civilization, Europe, Husserl claims,
is the bearer of the universal and the way in which other human
communities may ‘possess the world’ ultimately has no real importance
for the ‘European Man’: ‘Therein lies something unique’, Husserl
writes, speaking of ‘the spiritual image of Europe’, ‘which all other
human groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that, apart from
all considerations of expediency, becomes a motivation from them —
despite their determination to retain their spiritual autonomy —
constantly to Europeanize themselves, whereas we, if we understand
ourselves properly, will never, for example, Indianize ourselves.’19
The Husserl who extols the ‘European humanity’ to remind it
of its true destination (in the face of the sickness of the continent
then under the threat of the destruction represented by Nazism)
thinks in a colonial world. Merleau-Ponty belongs to a world in
which the forces of decolonization are at work. The anthropological
experience of pluralism has a totally different significance for them
and a ‘lateral universal’ could only be an incomprehensible oxymoron
for the former. The latter does not see philosophy as the trajectory
traced by a unique incomparable telos and when he is the editor of
a collective volume on Les Philosophes célèbres (Famous philosophers) he
imagines a radically new formula for it, abandoning, Claude Imbert
writes, the traditional ‘history of systems for a constellation of entries
without architectonic or filiations’ (Imbert 2005a, 45). And whereas
Husserl insisted on the way in which philosophy projected its own
horizon ahead of itself, Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to the volume
questioned its ‘outside’. That made it impossible, as a consequence, ‘to
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 251
ignore other productions parallel to our western world, those of China
or India’ (Imbert 2005a, 46).
The question then is: should a volume on philosophy present itself
just as a juxtaposition of philosophers and philosophies (European,
Chinese, Indian, African . . .) parallel to one another? What does
it mean to take a philosophical account of the anthropological
experience? A detour through the debates a propos African philosophy
helps clarify what is at stake. In 1945 a book by a Belgian missionary,
Father Placide Tempels, who had lived for many years in the Congo
was published by Présence africaine, in Paris.20 Its very title, La Philosophie
bantoue [Bantu Philosophy], was meant to express that philosophy was
not the unique privilege of ‘the European Man’, and that its association
with an African culture (the Bantu) was not an oxymoron.21 Father
Tempels insisted in particular on the specificity of Bantu ontology,
the first principle of which is the equation being = force, to be is
to be a life-force. Pursuing the work of Father Tempels through a
precise linguistic and philosophical examination of different Bantu
languages, Rwandan ethnologist and philosopher Alexis Kagame came
to the conclusion that the Aristotelian traditional list for the ‘categories
of being’ had nothing universal, was definitely language-dependent,
and did not express the grammar of thought in general but that of
Aristotle’s particular Greek tongue.22 His own studies on the field had
led Kagame to the thesis that Bantu ontology and Logic functioned
according to a specific Bantu ‘table of categories’ (Kagame 1955).
Is the relativistic image of disconnected ontologies and philoso-
phies, each grounded on their own linguistic systems and their own
‘categories of being’, the answer to Merleau-Ponty’s question about
the possibility of philosophy? The debate among African philosophers
about philosophy, anthropology and the becoming-philosophical
of African languages has indeed revolved around such a question.
In that debate the position represented by Paulin Hountondji is
crucial. Hountondji is the author of a widely debated book, African
Philosophy: Myth and Reality, in which he opposes, in the name
of the universality of philosophical investigation, the approach that
he labeled ethno-philosophical: meaning that a philosophy trapped
in a given culture and language, and thus synonymous with some
collective mentality of the people who share the culture and speak
the language,23 is not the open-ended and always unfinished project
that philosophy is. Many who criticized Hountondji’s philosophical
universalism blamed his position on his Althusserian understanding
of philosophy as articulated to science. In fact, as he himself made
252 Paragraph
clear in his latest book, his demand that philosophy remain free from
ethnographical prison has more to do with his thinking in and with
Husserl, to whom he devoted his dissertation.24
Hountondji’s ultimate position, as is the case with Merleau-Ponty
and Claude Imbert, is to start with the fact of anthropological pluralism
and to read the task of philosophy as that of what Merleau-Ponty has
called une raison élargie, an ‘expanded reason’. Speaking of the impor-
tance of Marcel Mauss’s work he writes: ‘In conceiving of the social as
a symbolism, he had provided himself with the means for respecting
individual and social reality and cultural variety without making one
impervious to the other. An expanded reason ought to be able to penetrate
even the irrational of magic and gift.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 116)25
Claude Imbert reinforces the notion that anthropology presents a
test to philosophy by speaking of the ‘outside constituted by other
fundamental experiences of thought’, using here a phrase borrowed from
Jean Cavaillès. Claude Imbert writes, commenting on Merleau-Ponty,
that ‘philosophy finds itself having to deal with other fundamental
experiences of thought that it can no longer just subordinate to itself ’
(Imbert 2005a, 46–7). But she immediately adds to that admission:
‘there follows no resignation’. That the Logos is ‘scattered’ (Merleau-
Ponty 1964a, 132) and that we are now in the face of ‘disconnected
fragments (. . .) of the syntax of experience’ (Imbert 2005, 59) does not
mean resignation from the task of exploring with ‘an expanded reason’
a ‘lateral universal’ which requires the patience of the oblique passage
from a fragment to another: the continuous negotiation of translation.
Besides, the ‘fundamental experiences’ confronting such an ‘expanded
reason’ are not only the outside of other cultural and philosophical
traditions, other languages with their unique styles of ‘possessing
the world’. They are also the ‘closer outside of mathematics or the
arts’ (Imbert 2005a, 46). Hence the importance of arts, paintings in
particular, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought (and Imbert’s). Thus, when he
writes on Cézanne Merleau-Ponty’s goal is to explore the possibilities
of the ‘expanded reason’: ‘The meaning of what the artist is going
to say’, Merleau-Ponty writes in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (first published in
1945), ‘does not exist anywhere — not in things, which as yet have no
meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons
one away from the already constituted reason in which “cultured men”
are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which would embrace
its own origins.’26
There is a fundamental lesson in the work of art when it comes to
making ‘oblique passages’, breaking through what Merleau-Ponty has
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 253
called ‘the obscure clarity of a particular style’ to ‘end by discovering
what the artist wanted to communicate’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 20).
Then we find out that it is possible, at this particular moment, in the
inexhaustible process of expanding reason, to overcome fragmentation
in the way a work of art can ‘unite separate lives’ and ‘dwell undivided
in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial
acquisition’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 20). That possibility is translation.
Why is it useful and, indeed, necessary, in order to fully understand
Claude Imbert’s contribution, to make the detour I have made
by Merleau-Ponty, to follow the trajectory that led the author of
Phenomenology of Perception to ‘take [a] lesson from the symbolic
production that is painting’ (Imbert 2005a, 54)? Because that is
the same trajectory that led Claude Imbert herself from Frege to
Lévi-Strauss and . . . Merleau-Ponty; and that led her from Logic
and its history to the lesson contained in modern painting and in
anthropology. Both trajectories show how ‘the obsolete dream of
a cosmotheoros, contemplator of the world has faded out’ (Imbert
2005a, 54): for logic and its dream of a universal language it
means confrontation with fragmented syntaxes; for phenomenology
it means that ‘the regime of enunciation’ by which ‘perception and
phenomenology had been united for a long time’ (Imbert 2005a, 59)
has now given way to the natural multiplicity of different ‘ways of
grasping reality [prises de réel], at once ways of being, of thinking and of
speaking’ (Imbert 2005a, 59). Indeed when she writes about Merleau-
Ponty, Claude Imbert is writing about herself. She is writing about the
lesson she came to learn that the study of logic and its history, that of
anthropology and of modern painting all converge to indicate that the
philosophical task, now, is that of exploring laterally the universal: it is
the task of translation.
When in the late 1960’s Van Heijenoort was introducing Naville to
the young ‘French translator of Frege’ he probably did not guess that he
was also speaking about a thinker who would demonstrate translation
to be the task of philosophy.

NOTES
1 All the letters from Van Heijenoort, Naville and Claude Imbert that I quote
here are to be found in Naville’s archives at the ‘Musée Social’ in Paris
(CEDIAS, Musée Social, 5, rue Las Cases, 75007, Paris). I thank my friend
Françoise Blum who called my attention to them.
2 On September 20, 1968.
254 Paragraph
3 Dated October 7, 1968.
4 Gottlob Frege, Les Fondements de l’arithmétique: recherche logico-mathématique sur
le concept de nombre, translated by Claude Imbert (Paris: Seuil, 1970).
5 Gottlob Frege, Ecrits logiques et philosophiques, translated by Claude Imbert
(Paris: Seuil, 1971).
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, translated by John O’Neill
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Henceforth (Merleau-
Ponty 1973).
7 Claude Imbert will have the following comment to make about Merleau-
Ponty’s book: noting, first, that the very expression ‘prose of the world’
was used by Hegel to characterize the stoicism which had ‘taken physical
phenomenology to its ultimate point of precision’, she declares that it was the
same kind of ‘effort’ that Merleau-Ponty had undertaken in his book before
‘he became disillusioned with it’ (Imbert 1999c, 35). In a footnote to that
remark, she mentions that the book, unfinished, was ultimately ‘abandoned
to its own conclusions in total contrast with the title’. As the reflection
developed, Merleau-Ponty realized that the conclusions to which he was led
were precisely that it was not possible to consider that the world would be
simply expressed, without loss, in the perceptive language of its ‘prose’. All
translations of quotations from Claude Imbert’s works in French are mine.
8 ‘Car beaucoup de nos problèmes logiques sont là: pour avoir reçu le spectre
d’une langue absolue, d’une logique universelle et non moins quelque
ambition synoptique.’
9 ‘une mathesis universalis où se confondraient dans une commune réplique
‘caractéristique’ les objets, les operations qui s’y trouvent définies, et la pensée
des unes et des autres, était réclamée par les deux familles philosophiques’.
10 Boole’s main work (1854) bears the title An Investigation of the Laws of Thought
on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities while
Frege’s Ideography (Begriffschrift) (1879) has as its subtitle: a formula language,
modeled on that of arithmetic, of pure thought . Boole’s book can be found online
at: http://www.edugrid.in/download/G.Boole_book.pdf (Consulted on 28
March/2011). Hereafter (Boole 1854).
11 Letter to Hilbert on October 1st , 1895 quoted in Imbert 1992, 182.
12 Edmund Husserl, ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’ (1931), p.10. Can be
found online in a translation by Thomas Sheeban and Richard E. Palmer
at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan.bak/EHtrans/
g-phenan.pdf (Consulted on 28 March 2011.)
13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, translated by Richard McCleary (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 105. Henceforth (Merleau-Ponty
1964a).
14 Merleau-Ponty establishes an important distinction between the two figures
of universality in the following terms: ‘the equipment of our social being
 Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty 255
can be dismantled and reconstructed by the voyage, as we are able to learn to
speak other languages. This provides a second way to the universal: no longer the
overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal
which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of
the self through the other person and the other person through the self. It is a
question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of
view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken
views each has of the other can all find a place — that is of constituting a more
comprehensive experience which becomes in principle accessible to men of
a different time and country’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 119–20) [my emphasis].
15 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Cited at http://www.great-quotes.com/
quote/64391. (Consulted on 27 December 2010.)
16 The often quoted declaration by Umberto that the language of Europe is
translation could be generalized here to say that there is no universal language
other than translation. See La langue de l’Europe, c’est la traduction (Arles: Assises
de la traduction littéraire, 1993).
17 He expresses the hope that the letter would be published in the then
forthcoming complete works of Husserl (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 107).
18 And Merleau-Ponty quotes an important passage of the letter in which
Husserl writes: ‘It is a possible and highly important task, it is a great task
to project ourselves into (. . .) a human community enclosed in its living and
traditional sociality, and to understand it insofar as, in and on the basis of its
total social life, that human community possesses the world (Merleau-Ponty
1964a, 107–8).
19 Edmund Husserl, ‘The Crisis of European Man’, in Phenomenology and the
Crisis of Philosophy, translated by Quentin Lauer (New York, Evanston, and
London: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 157. Henceforth (Husserl 1965).
20 Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, 2nd edition (Paris: Présence africaine,
1969). The book was first published locally, in Lovania, in Flemish before
Présence africaine had it translated and published in French the same year, in
1945. It was then published in English in 1969.
21 It is true that a few years earlier, in 1935, a British District Officer, based in
what was then Northern Rhodesia, had published a book entitled Primitive
Philosophy that dealt with the thinking of the Bantu peoples of that region.
But the impact was not the same, probably because of the word ‘primitive’
which then took out most of the weight of the word ‘philosophy’.
22 Alexis Kagamé, La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (Bruxelles: Mémoires de
l’Académie royale des sciences coloniales, Nouvelle Série 6:1, 1955). French
linguist Emile Benveniste will say the same thing in an article published three
years later, in 1958 (‘Categories of Thought and Categories of Language’),
and republished in the volume Problems of General Linguistics, translated by
Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971).
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23 Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, translated by Henri
Evans, Second edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
24 Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture,
and Democracy in Africa, translated by John Conteh-Morgan (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2002). On page 75 of the book, Paulin Hountondji writes
that ‘this critique [of ethnophilosophy] draws (. . .) from the long study of
Husserl and, beyond him, of the entire tradition of Western philosophy, some
of its weapons, bearings, and conceptual instruments.’
25 Emphasis mine. In fact, I have corrected the translation of the last sentence
given by Richard McCleary. His (usually excellent) translation does not
do justice here to the full force of what Merleau-Ponty calls an ‘expanded
reason’, and not just ‘a more comprehensive way of thinking’ as McCleary’s
translation goes.
26 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert Dreyfus
and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),
19. Henceforth (Merleau-Ponty 1964b).
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