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My title is, as a reader familiar with The Visible and the Invisible will have recognized, a quote. It comes at the end of the November 1959 Working Notewhich is entitled "I — the other, an inadequate formula". This formula is inadequate, Merleau-Ponty suggests, because it formulates "a Western problem" (VI 221)."Western'is italicized here, which means that it was underlined in Merleau-Ponty's manuscript. And one of the reasons why I put a question mark behind that quote in my title is because I wonder what that underlining means. What goes through our mind when we hear that a certain problem is a Western problem? Since we hear this so often and more and more so, we should reflect on this, especially since it is not sure that the way we — today, almost 40 years later and in a different historical setting — hear such statements is the way in which Merleau-Ponty intended us to hear his italics. It is too soon to make wild guesses about what Merleau-Ponty meant when he underlined"Western'and we will have to come back to that as we go on unpacking this Working Note. But for now, let me just confess that this little word"Western'doesn't sit easily with me and that I cannot but sense a certain discomfort when reading this or similar passages in The Visible and the Invisible and elsewhere. And since I am confessing, I might as well add that it is not just this word"Western'which makes me feel uneasy and that there are other words, or better: a certain atmosphere which I associate rightly or wrongly with this philosophy, which seems to overdetermine the discomfort which I sensed, a bit to my surprise, as I was rereading these pages which for such a long time had inspired me and taught me so much.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_9

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