Abstract

When Merleau-Ponty writes about belief in the Christian God, he does not explicate the belief phenomenologically, whilst accepting Husserl’s claim that God cannot perceive panoptically or access human consciousness fully. For the later Merleau-Ponty the Christian idea of God incarnate does not separate the absolute from existence, and God is found wherever we gather in his name and ameliorate suffering. Yet Christianity remains haunted by the threat of acosmism, or the collapse of the real world into the divinity. I respond that believers are not concerned by full access to their first-person states. What is important is the way we are accessed. When we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s later conception of God, I contend that it draws on the resources of the Christian tradition it disavows and is open to a Nietzschean critique. Just as importantly it neglects the phenomenon of motivation. I suggest that William James does much to set out a first-person phenomenology of an inspirational belief in God that Merleau-Ponty neglects.