Belief and Trust. Two Interpretations of the Concept of Protodoxa
This article offers two different interpretations of the concept of protodoxa or primordial faith as used by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: a cognitivistic interpretation and an existential interpretation. It argues that Merleau-Ponty's understanding of our primary relation to reality is influenced by Husserl's late manuscripts, on the one hand, and by Kierkegaard's discussion of religious faith, on the other hand. For Merleau-Ponty, primoridal faith is not a propositional attitude, belief or judgment but an affective sensory relation that we have to the perceivable world. The paper ends in a description of the basic structures of the world encountered in this fundamental attitude or relation. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is not a set of objects but a texture of affective qualities.