Literature, Ontology, and Implex in Merleau-Ponty: Writing and Finding the Concrete Limit of Phenomena
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between the literary uses of language in Merleau-Ponty’s own work and his ontology. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of phenomenology—that is, his critique of an already critical philosophy—leads him to say that the limits of phenomena are inside the entire structure of the phenomena. They are, in other words, promiscuous or dehiscent and therefore are not limits that can themselves be given. Merleau-Ponty would say that such limits are silent or mute within meaning. This will have repercussions for the very method of phenomenology. It can no longer be a descriptive method, concerned with the givenness of the phenomena, but needs to be matrixed with an expressive method that shows up the impossibility of such a return. This expressive method has to do with what he calls the “implex”—the very bodily limit of the inside and the outside that cannot be thought as one or the other, or even their synthesis. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology invites us towards a concrete bodily limit that is, at the same time, a limit to philosophy. In effect, one cannot think of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh apart from language, because this ontology, its very concrete crystallization, requires expression and not just description.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".