Against the “view from nowhen”: A Merleau-Pontyan contribution to Dummett’s approach to McTaggart’s paradox

Abstract

This paper will attempt to explore the fecundity of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of time, by means of showing how it can be linked with a problem whose origin is external to the phenomenological tradition: Michael Dummett’s approach to McTaggart’s paradox. With this purpose, I will make explicit the striking parallelism between the Merleau-Pontyan “situational” conception of time (that is, his tenet that time can only exist for a subjective perspective situated in time itself) and Dummett’s view that time can not appear in a “complete description” of reality, in other words, that the flow of time vanishes if we try to describe reality without any point of view (a description that would amount to what has been called “a view from nowhen”). I will try to show (via an incidental polemic with recent inter­pretations, such as Hoy’s, which turn Merleau-Ponty into an “idealist”) how the French phenomenologist’s analysis contributes to support Dummett’s tenet concerning the tension between time and a non-situated description of reality, as well as to prove that his notion of time’s synthesis as a transition-synthesis makes it possible to include, in the same account, a “pluralist” element along with a combinability of the different temporal perspectives.