The Authenticity in Ambiguity: Appreciating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Abductive Logic as Communicative Practice

Abstract

This article is a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's An Unpublished Text (1964a), as an exemplar of communicative praxis. As a poetic, stylistic account of the body of his life's work, this text self-signifies his potential as an authentic scholar. Employing a motivated logic that is abductive (Peirce, 1955), he argued for an appreciation of our phenomenological and semiotic circumstances of existential ambiguity. Furthermore, from this phenomenal ground, he articulated the pragmatic conditions of authenticity that inhere within every communication engagement with an Other. My interpretation of the Etre Au Monde of his philosophy depicts authenticity as human potentiality in the context of an existential dialectic between personal consciousness and sociocultural experience. We find that ambiguity and authenticity implicate one another as philosophical issues and thus remain highly relevant for a postmodern philosophy that problematizes our constitution as communicative beings.